Patent ID: 7912659

Claim:
A gearbox monitoring system, comprising: at least one vibration sensor coupleable to a gearbox housing a plurality of gear sets, wherein the at least one vibration sensor is operable to generate a signal representative of gearbox vibration; and a processing unit operable to identify a specific gear set within the plurality of gear sets as a location of a fault based on frequency and a summation of squares of amplitude of the signal representative of vibration; wherein the processing unit is programmed to establish a plurality of dynamic energy indexes, each dynamic energy index corresponding to a vibration energy in a frequency band; wherein the summation of squares of the amplitude of the signal representative of vibration is computed over a defined frequency band; a power sensor operable to provide a signal representative of output power of a generator coupled to the gearbox, to the processing unit to enable the processing unit to normalize the plurality of dynamic energy indexes based on the generator output power.