Gear tooth root fatigue test monitoring with continuous acoustic emission

<p>A test rig is used to load an individual gear tooth in static bending fatigue. The two gears are meshed together, with the lower (fully restrained, rotation prevented) gear attached to a fixed shaft whilst the upper (free) gear is mounted on a shaft held in bearings.  A torque is applied to this shaft using a compression testing machine via a loading arm.<br></p><p>Acoustic Emission signals were collected by a Pancom P15 sensor (50 – 500 kHz) coupled to the free gear adjacent to the tooth under test using cyanoacrylate adhesive.</p><p>The data was recorded by a MISTRAS group PCI 2 data acquisition system. Complete wavestreams were captured over one loading cycle. These wavestreams capture the sensor output without any interpretation by the data acquisition system, and are independent of threshold.</p><p>Each wavestream was collected every 10 cycles, sampled at 2MHz, 16-bit resolution and a duration of 1s, which covers one complete tooth loading cycle.</p><p>Results based upon these data are published at http://doi.org/10.1177/1475921717700567<br></p>