Spindle Bearing Degradation Monitoring

Unexpected failure of spindle bearings can lead to severe part damage and costly machine downtime. Finally, it will affect efficiency and productivity. The Watchdog Agent bearing monitoring system performs diagnostic tasks to detect bearing defects, visualize them, and then quantify defects on a different stage. It provides an illustrative and quantitative explanation on high-speed machine maintenance for spindle health.

Challenge
• Isolate bearing defect vibration signature from environmental noise
• Predict bearing remain life with high-speed machine working environment

For easier detection of bearing defects, the envelope detection technique has been used together with Fast Fourier Transforms. First, Envelope Detection (ED) at the spindle system resonance frequency located in high range is applied. The amplitude demodulation by ED allows detection of localized bearing defect without interference of noise vibration from other structural sources.

Finally, artificial intelligent algorithm (self-organized map) is applied to recognize different defect vibration pattern and quantify the defects at different stage. The bearing monitoring tool is embedded in Watchdog Agent Machine Health & Maintenance system to facilitate the engineer in understanding the current condition of spindle bearing and diagnosing bearing defects.