Signal Processing to Reduce the Effect of Gear Dynamics

An improved conditioning monitoring technique is provided for rotating components in gearboxes that account for gear system dynamics. A rotation rate for the component is generated from vibration data by estimating the rotation rate based on a tachometer measurement of another shaft and the shaft ratio. This estimated rotation rate is used, together with the known configuration of the component, to estimate a known gear mesh frequency of the component. By filtering for a range of frequencies around the gear mesh frequency based on variation in the shaft rate, the gear mesh frequency can be determined, and from that signal, an actual rotation rate for the component can be determined. The exact rate can then be used in deriving an analytic vibration spectrum for the component that is not degraded due to gear system dynamics effects. Further, this allows the calculation of the gearbox transfer function.