A joint adaptive wavelet filter and morphological signal processing method for weak mechanical impulse extraction

Abstract

Periodical impulses are vital indicators of rotating machinery faults. Therefore, the extraction of weak periodical impulses from vibration signals is of great importance for incipient fault detection. However, measured signals are often severely tainted by various noises, which makes the detection of impulses rather difficult. As such, a proper signal processing technique is necessary. In this paper, a hybrid method comprised of wavelet filter and morphological signal processing (MSP) is proposed for this task. The wavelet filter is used to eliminate the noise and enhance the impulsive features. Then, the filtered signal is processed by the morphological closing operator and a local maximum algorithm to isolate periodical impulses. To select the proper parameters of the joint approach, i.e., the center frequency, the bandwidth of wavelet filter, and the length of flat structuring elements (SE), a novel optimization algorithm based on differential evolution (DE) is developed. The results of simulated experiments and bearing vibration signal analysis verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.