During the development phase of a new transmission system, it is necessary to perform extensive fatigue testing of gears on purpose-built test facilities in order to be able to ensure reliability of each of the components over an exhaustive range of operational conditions. In this application there is a need for an on-line monitoring system capable of indicating, at the earliest possible stage, the presence of a fault or pitting which can occur on the teeth of the gears transmitting torque. This article describes data analysis procedures, originally developed for the similar problem of detecting damage in structures, which have been applied in this project to measurements made on a transmission system under development. In particular a relatively straightforward fault-detection procedure employing Singular Value Decomposition has been used to enable damage on the gear teeth to be detected at an early stage, the results being compared to those obtained using more traditional techniques for identifying faults in gears.
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