Slew Bearings Damage Detection using Hilbert Huang Transformation and Acoustic Methods

Slow speed slew bearings are widely used in many applications such us radar, aviation and aerospace units, bogie bearings for vehicles, harbor and shipyard cranes. Slew bearings are design to carry out high axial and radial loads, they have high titling rigidity and they lubricated with grease. Slew bearings consist of the rollers, the inner and the outer ring and the gear in general. One of the most common problems arising in such equipments is the vibration levels due to wear of either regarding the rollers or the other components. Actually, it is very critical for his safe operation and reliability to know from where the vibrations come from, and how much severe are. In this article, the acoustic emission method is used in order to excite slew bearings either for laboratory tests or real naval application receiving the sound waves in the time domain. The Hilbert Huang Transformation (HHT) with the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is used in order to detect the possible defect and to estimate the healthy state from the measured sound signals of the bearing, through to investigation of the statistical index kurtosis.