Condition monitoring of marine couplings by means of vibration analysis techniques

This paper shows the application of some processing techniques for the vibration analysis in working conditions of two different types of marine flexible couplings for boat propulsion. The flexible couplings are mounted between the flywheel of the marine diesel engine and the propeller shaft. The vibration signals are processed in time and frequency domain. Moreover, due to the presence of impulses in the signals, Continuous (CWT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) are applied and compared with the conventional time and frequency domain methods. In this work the wavelet analysis is used for the impulse component extraction and the choice of different wavelet functions for this purpose is evaluated. The experimental comparison between two different types of couplings is also given. The results suggest that the wavelet transform techniques are effective to indicate which type of coupling provides a good vibrational behaviour especially in working condition when the angular speed of the propeller shaft is often inverted. Copyright © 2013 by ASME.