Rolling element bearings are a vital part in many rotating machinery, including vehicles. A defective bearing can be a symptom of other problems in the machinery and is due to a high failure rate. Early detection of bearing defects can therefore help to prevent malfunction which ultimately could lead to a total collapse. The thesis is done in collaboration with Scania that wants a better understanding of how external sensors such as accelerometers, can be used for condition monitoring in their gearboxes. Defective bearings creates vibrations with specific frequencies, known as Bearing Characteristic Frequencies, BCF [23]. A key component in the proposed method is based on identification and extraction of these frequencies from vibration signals from accelerometers mounted near the monitored bearing. Three solutions are proposed for automatic bearing fault detection. Two are based on data-driven classification using a set of machine learning methods called Support Vector Machines and one method using only the computed characteristic frequencies from the considered bearing faults. Two types of features are developed as inputs to the data-driven classifiers. One is based on the extracted amplitudes of the BCF and the other on statistical properties from Intrinsic Mode Functions generated by an improved Empirical Mode Decomposition algorithm. In order to enhance the diagnostic information in the vibration signals two pre-processing steps are proposed. Separation of the bearing signal from masking noise are done with the Cepstral Editing Procedure, which removes discrete frequencies from the raw vibration signal. Enhancement of the bearing signal is achieved by band pass filtering and amplitude demodulation. The frequency band is produced by the band selection algorithms Kurtogram and Autogram. The proposed methods are evaluated on two large public data sets considering bearing fault classification using accelerometer data, and a smaller data set collected from a Scania gearbox. The produced features achieved significant separation on the public and collected data. Manual detection of the induced defect on the outer race on the bearing from the gearbox was achieved. Due to the small amount of training data the automatic solutions were only tested on the public data sets. Isolation performance of correct bearing and fault mode among multiplebearings were investigated. One of the best trade offs achieved was 76.39 % fault detection rate with 8.33 % false alarm rate. Another was 54.86 % fault detection rate with 0 % false alarm rate.

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Wave ocean energy is a source of renewable energy which is gaining interest in the modern world. In contrast to other well-researched renewable energy sources such as wind energy, wave ocean energy is under the development phase. Governments around the world are encouraging the research of harnessing wave energy. As of now, there are different concepts to harness energy from waves. Tribological components are one of the main aspects that need attention in these wave energy converters. The moving components such as bearings can be the life-determining component of the entire device. This thesis provides conceptual solutions to adapt an existing start-stop bearing test rig to the conditions of wave energy converters. The test rig can test different bearing sused in the wave energy converters. The new design intends to provide scaled wave energy conditions. These conditions are mainly influenced by the oscillating movement of the bearings, the complex load condition and the salty environment. Since the testing of bearings in wave energy converters is in the initial stage, modular designs are implemented to test different types of bearings. / Se filen