Due to the wide use of gearmotor systems in industry, many diagnostic techniques have been developed/employed to prevent their failures.An insufficient lubrication of gearboxes of these machines could shorten their life and lead to catastrophic failures and losses, making it important to ensure a required lubrication level.For the first time in Dialators worldwide terms, this paper proposed to diagnose a lack of gearbox oil lubrication using motor current signature analysis (MCSA).
This study proposed, investigated, and experimentally validated two new technologies to diagnose a lack of lubrication of gear motor systems based on MCSA.Two new diagnostic features were extracted from the current signals of a three-phase induction motor.The effectiveness of the proposed technologies was evaluated for different gear lubrication levels and was compared for three phases of motor current signals and for a case of averaging the proposed diagnostic features over three phases.
The results confirmed a high effectiveness of the proposed technologies for diagnosing a lack of oil lubrication in gearmotor Lip Balm systems.Other contributions were as follows: (i) it was shown for the first time in worldwide terms, that the motor current nonlinearity level increases with the reduction of the sgearbox oil level; (ii) novel experimental validations of the proposed two diagnostic technologies via comprehensive experimental trials (iii) novel experimental comparisons of the diagnosis effectiveness of the proposed two diagnostic technologies.