Design and Fabrication of a Test Rig for a New Approach on Health Monitoring of Roller Bearings Using Acoustic Emission

This article presents the design, equipment selection and implementation of a test rig using non-destructive evaluation (NDE) for rolling element bearings used in Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT), designed and manufactured by Icewind in Iceland. The design is outlined along with the description and preliminary results of a pilot test of the rig. Features of Acoustic emission waves are used for the health monitoring and fault detection. The proposed method of using AE wave segments to construct a surface plot of features is presented. The usage of a high precision encoder to map the acoustic wave over the rotation of the bearing is proposed and demonstrated. Using surface feature plots and the mapped location in the rotation is an intuitive way to characterise the AE signal for condition monitoring, and allows for the possibility to locate defects in bearings effectively providing additional information to time frequency analysis such as Fourier transformations on the acoustic signal.