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Predictive maintenance of ball bearings for machine rotating with arbitrary

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Article · January 2008

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Predictive maintenance of ball bearings for machine
rotating with arbitrary velocity profiles

M. Cocconcelli∗ , C. Secchi∗ , R. Rubini∗ , C. Fantuzzi∗ , L. Bassi∗∗

∗ University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Department of Science and Engineering Methods

Via Amendola 2, I-42100, Reggio Emilia, Italy

e-mail: {marco.cocconcelli,cristian.secchi,riccardo.rubini,cesare.fantuzzi}@unimore.it
∗∗ Tetra Pak Packaging Solutions

via Delfini,1 44100, Modena, Italy

e-mail: luca.bassi@tetrapak.com

Abstract
Recent research and development on direct–drive motor technology and on their control system push forward
the application of these devices as electric cams in a large numbers of industrial applications, such as example
motion control system for packaging machineries. Performances of these devices are much higher than the
mechanical solutions for machine motion, in terms of precision and operational speed, and, of course, in
time required to reconfigure the motion profile.
However, classical approaches to the ball bearing diagnosis that use analysis of vibration signals are not
longer applicable, as they have been developed on the hypothesis of drive constant speed. In fact, in most
of the current industrial application, the control system drives the motor to follow a complex and cyclic (i.e.
motor shaft reverses its motion direction at each operational cycle) non constant speed motion profile.
In those application, even Computed Order Tracking [1] (COT), which is the main fault bearing diagnosis
technique used in non-constant velocity applications, fails to detect incipient faults, as highlighted by Fyfe
and Munck in [2].
This paper presents a new procedure that modifies the COT to be successfully applicable to the diagnosis
problem of ball bearings in variable speed motion applications.

1 Introduction.

Ball bearing faults represent the 70 ÷ 85% of the causes of downtime in the line-production machines.
The problem of to predict the health status of bearing has been studied since the last decades and different
approaches have been proposed by several authors.
The most common approach is based on the study of the frequency content of the vibration signal of the
bearing. The bearing could be modelled as an epicyclic gear and, thus, the angular velocities of all the
bearing elements are fixed by the rotational speed of the inner race. If a fault happens on the bearing (e.g.
on the external race) each time a ball passes on this fault, it causes an impact which generates a mechanical
vibration peak. As long as the rotational frequency is constant, the impacts happen with a given frequency
which could be identified as it’s well known that the relationship between the fault and the rotation frequency
can be identified from the bearing geometry.
This approach is useful for the applications in which the electrical motor operates at constant rotational
velocity, but it is not longer useful for the modern direct drive motors, such as brushless motors, which are
used as electric cams in order to track variable velocity profiles. In fact, variable motion profiles produce a
train of pulses caused by the series of impacts that feature a variable frequency of the vibration signal, hence
the Fourier Transform based methods are not longer applicable to process vibration signal to identify the
impacts caused by the faults.
A further problem in industrial application is that usually the motor performs a cycle, which means that there
is a part of the motion profile tracked in a clockwise direction, then the motion changes and the shaft rotates
in counter-clockwise direction, which makes harder to identify the fault signatures from the vibration signal.
In fact, let’s assume that a ball-bearing is damaged on the external ring. If the inner race velocity is constant,
the fault frequency depends on the rotational frequency of the shaft. If the shaft velocity is changing, e.g.
with a constant acceleration motion profile, the spectrum of the acquired vibration signal features a spread
of frequency because the change in velocity produces an aperiodic impulse set.
The order tracking methods proposes to change the way in which the vibration signal are acquired, instead of
a constant time sampling, it uses a sampling criteria following the shaft angular position, picking a vibration
sample at each predefined position step of the motor.
This new spatial-sampling is equivalent to put an “observer” on the shaft. Since the relative motion between
external and inner race is fixed by the geometrical dimension of the bearing, the “observer” finds an impact
in the same position independently of the shaft velocity and the frequency spectrum of the vibration signal
will have a unique clear peak which reveals the presence of the fault. In this specific spectrum, the abscissa
axis could not be defined properly as “frequency” because of the spatial-sampling instead of time-sampling,
indeed the “orders” are defined which are the number of samples taken in a revolution of the shaft.
Order Tracking needs a smart and nonstandard acquisition system, which has the capability of setting the
sampling frequency to follow the velocity change of the shaft. In order to use standard signal acquisition
systems, Potter [1] proposed a new method divided in two parts: in the first part acquire the vibration signal
with a constant time sampling and also a tachometer signal which records the time instants when the shaft
makes a complete rotation, and in the second part it re-sample the vibration signal conveniently to obtain a
spatial-sampling through a off-line algorithm. This technique is called Computed Order Tracking (COT).
Fyfe and Munck [2] analyze the COT and highlight the worst working conditions of the COT which are:

• low velocity profile of the motor

• high acceleration

• low keyfasor (the tachometer signal) sampling rate

Indeed, these working conditions are all still present in the modern packaging machines. For example, the
absence of a reducer between the direct drive motor and the mechanical components of the manufacturing
process requires low motor speed.
Tis paper presents an improved version of the COT in order to use it as a tool in the ball-bearing diagnostic
which tackles the above problems, in particular for the non-constant velocity industrial applications.
The paper is organized as follows. After a brief introduction and problem statement given in this Section,
the procedure exploited our work is described in Section 2. Simulative results are reported in sections 3.

2 A procedure for bearing diagnose for arbitrary motion profile ap-

plication

The standard control scheme of a electrical drive motion control uses the position measure from an Encoder
or Resolver position sensor to compute the control law for precise mechanical device positioning. In the
procedure detailed in the following, the encoder signal is used as keyfasor in COT, but differently from a real
keyfasor, which generates an output signal at each revolution (a keyfasor frequency of 1 Hz), the encoder
produces the output signal at the acquisition frequency, which is quite higher than the standard keyfasor (e.g.
8 kHz on the Rockwell MPLB680B-M motors series). Suppose that the encoder frequency is 8 kHz, then
the position of the shaft is known with a brake of 125 microseconds between two acquisition samples.
During this time period, the velocity and the position of the shaft are supposed to be constant and changing
linearly, respectively. The real-time position profile get from the encoder allows to determine the time
instants when the shaft has made a rotation of a fixed arbitrary value as in the goal of the original Order
Tracking. Once those time instants have been calculated, their corresponding vibration data are collected in
a new vector. This vector represents the vibration signal acquired with the spatial-sampling.
Position and vibration values in the time period between two data points are calculated by a linear inter-
polation. In industrial applications the motion inversion of the shaft is often present due to an alternate
mechanism placed after the motor. In those cases the modified order tracking is still usable but its output has
to be conveniently analyzed. Indeed, every time a motion inversion occurs the signal has to be split in order
to divide the clockwise and anticlockwise motions. This operation is necessary to divide the motion profile
into sets containing homogeneous motion directions. Once these splits are defined, the frequency content of
each set is analyzed, e.g by the Fast Fourier Transform. Because the passage from time-sampling to spatial-
sampling, the frequency scale in the Fourier analysis has changed. For each collected part of motion profile
the new sampling frequency is given as ratio between the number of samples after the algorithm application
and the time spent tasking that motion before the algorithm application. The ball-bearing characteristic fault
frequency could now be calculated. They are still proportional to the rotational frequency through the liter-
ature formula. The equivalent rotational frequency after the algorithm application is experimentally given
by the mean of the absolute value of the velocity profile. The impossibility to collect contiguous revolutions
of the shaft limits the frequency resolution in the spectrum and makes the characteristic fault components
hardly detectable . To improve the Fourier spectrum, the signals could be previously cleaned from noise by
synchronous averages between the elements of each set. A deep cleaning of the signal is possible extending
the average over elements of different set which differ each other by the motion direction. In this average the
vectors of the two sets have to be flipped to be be compared to the ones of the other set.
Summarizing the procedure:

1. Apply the modified order tracking.

2. Split the output of the previous step into homogeneous parts such as same motion directions and same
path.

3. Make average over the elements of the sets defined in step two. In case the average is done of elements
of different sets conveniently modified.

4. Apply the Fast Fourier Transform to the single averages obtained in the step three.

In section 3 the application of the proposed procedure to an industrial case is reported.

3 Simulative results

In this section an artificial signal which simulates a fault on bearing is made. This Artificial fault algorithm
accepts as inputs an arbitrary motion profile and the geometrical dimensions of the bearing, while it gives
the artificial vibration signal for different faults as output. After a brief presentation of this fault-maker
algorithm, the artificial fault signals are used to validated the improved order tracking method proposed in
the previous section. In that test a real motion profile coming from an industrial packaging machine is used
as the input of the fault-maker algorithm.
3.1 Artificial Fault Algorithm

The kinematics behavior of the ball bearing is well described by the classic epicyclic gear approximation:
the inner race is the sun gear, the bearing’ spheres are the planet gears, the outer ring is the frame and the
cage of the bearing is the carrier. The sun gear angular velocity is given, because it is the angular velocity
of the motor’s shaft upon which the bearing is mounted. As a consequence the angular velocity of the
whole elements could be calculated and the rate between it and the shaft rotational velocity depends on the
geometric characteristic of the bearing. In Eq. (1) the kinematics relations between the angular velocity of
the ball bearing elements is reported.

ωn − ωp
= τo (1)
ω1 − ωp

where ωn , ωp and ω1 are the angular velocities of the outer race, the cage and the inner race, respectively and
τo is the transmission rate between outer and inner races in the case that the cage velocity was zero. This rate
could be expressed as a function of the geometrical dimensions of the bearing. Since ω = 2πf , those ratios
describe also the relations between the rotational frequency of the shaft and the rotational frequencies of the
bearing elements. If a fault is present – e.g. on the external race – every time a single sphere passes on the
fault, it generates an impact and the frequency of those impacts depends on the rotational frequency of the
shaft, the faulted element and the cage rotational frequency. These characteristic fault frequencies could be
calculated through the Eq. (1) and they are reported in Eqs. (2), (3), (4) and (5).

Z
fe = fr (1 − λcos(β)) (2)
2

Z
fi = fr (1 + λcos(β)) (3)
2

1
fc = fr (1 − λcos(β)) (4)
2

(1 − λcos(β))2
fv = fr (5)
2λ
where fe , fi , fc , fv and fr are the external race fault frequency, the inner race fault frequency, the cage
fault frequency, the revolving element fault frequency and the rotational frequency, respectively. Coefficient
d
λ= D is the ratio between the ball diameter d and the cage mean diameter D, β is the contact angle between
balls and bearing races and Z is the number of balls in the bearing. If the angular velocity ωr is not constant,
the fault frequencies are still related to the rotational frequency fr but they satisfy equations 2 – (5) instantly.
In this case the better is to move from frequency to time domain analysis where equations like (2–5) are
available but they express a relation between angular velocities instead of frequencies and they are reported
in Eqs. (6, 7, 8) and (9).

ωe = 0 (6)

ωi = ωr (7)

ωr
ωc = (1 − λcos(β)) (8)
2
 1 + λ − λ2 (cos2 (β) + cos(β))
ωv = ωr ( ) (9)
2λ
Equations (6 – 9) between the rotational velocity ωr and angular rotation of each part of the bearing allow
to predict the time instant when an impact occurs between a revolving element and a damage of the bearing
for any kind of motion profile ωr (t). In fact the knowledge of velocity profile ωr (t) allows to determine the
expected vibration signal of a damaged bearing.

3.1.1 Simulation of the fault on the external race

Consider a fault on the external race as example. The external ring is fixed and each time a ball passes on the
fault there is an impact. In this case we follows the steps:

1. Determine the corresponding angular velocity of the cage: Eq. (8)

R
2. Determine the angular displacement of the cage: φ(t) = ωc (t)dt

3. Determine the rotational range of the shaft: Φ = φmax − φmin

2π
4. Determine the angular distance between two adjacent balls due to the presence of the cage: δφ = Z
Φ
5. Determine the number of impacts in the whole displacement range of the cage: n = δφ where n is the
Φ
bigger integer minor or equal than δφ .

6. Determine all the time instants when the cage rotates of δφ

3.1.2 Simulation of the fault on the inner race

Consider now a fault on the inner race as example. In that case the relative velocity between inner ring and
the cage has to be calculated in order to determine the correct time interval between impacts. The steps to be
followed are:

1. Determine the angular velocity of the cage: Eq. (8)

2. Determine the angular velocity of the inner ring: (Eq. 7)

3. Determine the relative angular velocity between the cage and the inner ring: ωci (t) = ωc (t) − ωi (t)
R
4. Determine the angular displacement of the cage: φ(t) = ωci (t)dt

5. Determine the rotational range of the shaft: Φ = φmax − φmin

2π
6. Determine the angular distance between two adjacent balls due to the presence of the cage: δφ = Z
Φ
7. Determine the number of impacts in the whole displacement range of the cage: n = δφ where n is the
Φ
bigger integer minor or equal than δφ .

8. Determine all the time instants when the cage rotates of δφ

9. The amplitude A of these impacts are modulated through the angular velocity of inner race of the shaft:
A = As (1 + Am cos(2πωi )), where As is the amplitude of modulated signal and Am the modulating
signal.
Similar considerations allow to make the simplified fault model for the cage damage or bearing’s ball damage.
In all the different fault cases a n-dimensional vector of random numbers is taken and a peak is added to this
random vector in correspondence of the time instant when an impacts occurs according to the specific fault
model chosen. The resulting vector has the dimension n equal to the length of the position vector, while
the choice of random numbers simulates the presence of noise in the vibration data. More signals should be
done, e.g. to simulate the vibration signal of a bearing with two different faults at the same time, etc. . . The
peak added is not a single element impulse, but it has a bell-shape with a fixed even if arbitrary length.

3.2 Simulation of an outer race fault

The fault-maker algorithm is used to simulate an inner race fault. This signal is then used to tested the
high-frequency order tracking algorithm. The sampling frequency is 10kHz and the acquisition time is 10
seconds. The code number of the ball-bearing used is 6309, and its dimensions are reported in table 1.

Dimension 6309
D 74.54
d 17.46
β 10
Z 8

Table 1: Ball-bearing geometrical dimensions

The position profile used in this test is shown in figure 1

200

100
[deg]

−100

−200

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
[s]

Figure 1: Angular position profile

Figure 2 reports the artificial signal which simulates a fault on the outer race.
The new algorithm for the predictive maintenance ball bearings for machine rotating with arbitrary velocity
profiles is applied to the fault signal. The samples are sampled every time the shaft rotates of 0.1 degrees.
The results are shown in figure 3. Note that the abscissa label is [S∗] because they are not real seconds.
Before the frequency analysis an average is done along all the ramp-up part of the position profile and the
ramp-down. The result of the position and vibration average is shown in figure 4. The ramp-down parts have
been flipped to compare them with the ramp-up parts.
Finally the frequency content of the vibration signal is reported in figure 5. The sampling frequency fs ,
the rotational frequency fr and characteristics fault frequency fi are collected in table 2. The frequency
 1

0.8

0.6
Amplitude

0.4

0.2

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
[s]

Figure 2: Artificial vibration signal of a bearing faulted on the inner race

spectrum clearly shows peaks which differ one to another for 5.556Hz. This frequency corresponds to the
characteristic fault frequency of an external damage.

Hz
fs 13322
fr 1.8430
fe 5.6714

Table 2: Sampling frequency, Rotational frequency and fault frequency of the vibration signal

4 Conclusion

In this paper a procedure for the detection of faults of ball bearing elements of an electrical motor drives has
been presented. The procedure is a refinement of the Computed Order Tracking (COT) method, which has
been improved to tackle the case of low speed and high acceleration cases. The proposed procedure has been
tested in a simulated framework, which derives from a real case study developed in cooperation with Tetra
Pak Packaging Solutions. Simulative results prove the feasibility of the proposed method.

Acknowledgment

The Authors acknowledge the support of Tetra Pak Packaging Solution, and in particular Mr. Roberto Bor-
sari, Davide Borghi and Elena Sacchetti, for their invaluable suggestions and help, that made this work
possible.
 1

200
0.8

100
0.6

Amplitude
[deg]

0.4
−100

0.2
−200

0
0 5 10 0 5 10
[s*] [s*]

Figure 3: Position and Vibration outputs of the improved COT

References

[1] R. Potter, “A new order tracking method for rotating machinery,” Sound and Vibration, vol. 24, pp. 30–
34, 1990.

[2] K. Fyfe and E. Munck, “Analysis of computed order tracking,” Mechanical System and Signal Process-
ing, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 187–205, 1997.
 0.7

200 0.6

0.5
100

Amplitude
0.4
[deg]

0
0.3
−100
0.2

−200 0.1

0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
[s*] [s*]

Figure 4: Average of the Vibration and Position profiles

50

5.556 Hz
40

30
Amplitude

20

10

0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200
[Hz]

Figure 5: Frequency content of the algorithm output

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