Analysis of bearing faulty cage using non-intrusive condition monitoring techniques

— The cage is an important element of the bearing. The cage is used to support the bearing balls and it maintains the fix distance between rotating balls. The defected cage could create defects in the balls and race ways of the bearing. It could lead to premature failure of the bearing which causes machine down time, production loss and huge maintenance cost. Traditionally, periodic checks of the bearing health are performed in industry but they did not avoid the bearing cage failures. Thus, it is essential to develop some real-time health monitoring system to analyze the status of bearing cage. Recent research developments on the bearing fault diagnosis have that non-intrusive stator current and power analysis techniques are most economical and simple as compared to intrusive vibration analysis technique. However, a limited research has been conducted to check and confirm the effectivity of stator current and power analysis techniques for the diagnosis of cage faults. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyze cage faults using non-intrusive stator current and power analysis. The comparison of both techniques have been performed experimentally and it has been concluded that power analysis is a most suitable technique to diagnose cage faults.