Equipment and machinery in industries may produce ultrasound when they are getting into failure conditions, for example, when bearings are worn or deteriorated, pipes have pressure leaks, electrical installations have electrical discharge. This project aims to develop a testbed using the airborne ultrasound testing to inspect and monitor the conditions of ball bearings. The testbed consists of an ultrasonic microphone detecting signals, a microcontroller (MCU) implementing signal analysis, and a signal conditioning circuit. The microphone has a specified frequency band from 100 Hz till 80 kHz and connected to an active filter to retain signals within the frequency range of interest between 20 - 50 kHz. The measured signals were then sampled by the ADC on the MCU, and analyzed with an algorithm, that includes calculating the spectrum of a measured signal, finding local peaks in the spectrum and calculating the mean peak ratio (mPR – of the peaks). The developed testbed was first calibrated and tested with a known ultrasonic signal from a 40-kHz ultrasonic transmitter. Then it was used to inspect ball bearings with three different conditions, rotating at three speeds. The inspection results have shown a big difference of the mPRs between the mechanically worn bearings and the brand new. This reveals that the airborne ultrasound testing method is effective to monitor and indicate the working conditions of equipment and machinery at service. Future work should include improving the microphone unit and researching on how the frequency peaks are associated with the object conditions in the quantitative way.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-356405 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Dragsten, Fredrik |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för teknikvetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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