Design of sensor integrating gears: methodical development, integration and verification of an in-Situ MEMS sensor system

State of the art vibration-based condition monitoring at gearbox housings faces uncertainties in the interpretation of measurement data due to signal transformations and noise. The state of research shows that direct measurements at the source of vibrations with integrated sensors provide higher quality data. Capacitive MEMS sensors seem predestined for integration, but there is limited research covering compactly integrated MEMS sensor systems for condition monitoring by vibration measurement. In this contribution an integrated MEMS sensor system is designed methodically based on VDI 2206. A sensor system is selected based on requirements extracted of previous contributions and verified on a rotational shaker test rig. Afterwards it is integrated on a gear wheel in a gear test bench. Several verification measurements using different principles and locations are performed to verify the measurands. Results show that the gear mesh vibrations including the sidebands can be measured with the integrated sensors which provide superior signal-noise-ratios compared to other locations. This proofs that the sensor integrating gear system is principally able to perform high quality condition monitoring.