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Sound & Vibration

Machinery Fault Diagnosis 101

Read the spectrum and name the fault — unbalance, misalignment, looseness, bearing and gear signatures.

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Once you can read a spectrum, the next skill is naming what you see. Machinery Fault Diagnosis 101 turns the abstract picture into a decision: is this unbalance, misalignment, looseness, a bearing, a gear — or nothing to worry about yet? The course teaches a repeatable method built on running speed and its orders, so that peaks stop being anonymous lines and start being suspects with motives.

You will walk through the classic signatures one by one: unbalance at 1× and its steady phase, misalignment at 2× with its telltale axial vibration, looseness with its long train of harmonics and raised noise floor, and a first, practical look at bearing and gear defects. Along the way you will learn to bring in supporting evidence — orbit plots, crest factor, and the ISO 20816 severity bands — so your call is backed by more than one view. The aim is not to memorise a table but to reason from the physics of how each fault forces the machine to move.

What you'll be able to do
  • Identify unbalance from its 1× running-speed signature
  • Recognise misalignment at 2× and its axial component
  • Spot mechanical looseness and its harmonic train
  • Read basic bearing and gear signatures
  • Use orbits and crest factor as supporting evidence
  • Grade severity against ISO 20816
Curriculum
  1. 01 The diagnostic method — running speed, harmonics and orders
  2. 02 Unbalance — the 1× signature and phase
  3. 03 Misalignment — 2× radial and the axial tell
  4. 04 Mechanical looseness — harmonic trains and raised noise floor
  5. 05 Bearing and gear signatures — a first look
  6. 06 Orbits, crest factor and ISO 20816 severity
Go deeper

Written for this course's subject, free to read, and none of it behind a form. Each one goes further than a primer can.

Where this work is done

The jobs this subject belongs to. Useful if you are working out whether the course matches what your team actually does, or what the role looks like on the other side of it.

What the measurements are taken with

The instruments and rigs this subject is measured on, in case you want to see the hardware behind the worked examples. Nothing here is required to take the course — it is free and self-contained.

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