Condition monitoring of helicopter drive shafts using quadratic-nonlinearity metric based on cross-bispectrum

Based on cross-bispectrum, quadratic-nonlinearity coupling between two vibration signals is proposed and used to assess health conditions of rotating shafts in an AH-64D helicopter tail rotor drive train. Vibration data are gathered from two bearings supporting the shaft in an experimental helicopter drive train simulating different shaft conditions, namely, baseline, misalignment, imbalance, and combination of misalignment and imbalance. The proposed metric shows better capabilities in distinguishing different shaft settings than the conventional linear coupling based on cross-power spectrum.