Fault feature extraction of gearbox by using overcomplete rational dilation discrete wavelet transform on signals measured from vibration sensors

Abstract

Gearbox fault diagnosis is very important for preventing catastrophic accidents. Vibration signals of gearboxes measured by sensors are useful and dependable as they carry key information related to the mechanical faults in gearboxes. Effective signal processing techniques are in necessary demands to extract the fault features contained in the collected gearbox vibration signals. Overcomplete rational dilation discrete wavelet transform (ORDWT) enjoys attractive properties such as better shift-invariance, adjustable time–frequency distributions and flexible wavelet atoms of tunable oscillation in comparison with classical dyadic wavelet transform (DWT). Due to these advantages, ORDWT is presented as a versatile tool that can be adapted to analysis of gearbox fault features of different types, especially in analyzing the non-stationary and transient characteristics of the signals. Aiming to extract the various types of fault features confronted in gearbox fault diagnosis, a fault feature extraction technique based on ORDWT is proposed in this paper. In the routine of the proposed technique, ORDWT is used as the pre-processing decomposition tool, and a corresponding post-processing method is combined with ORDWT to extract the fault feature of a specific type. For extracting periodical impulses in the signal, an impulse matching algorithm is presented. In this algorithm, ORDWT bases of varied time–frequency distributions and varied oscillatory natures are adopted, moreover an improved signal impulsiveness measure derived from kurtosis is developed for choosing optimal ORDWT bases that perfectly match the hidden periodical impulses. For demodulation purpose, an improved instantaneous time–frequency spectrum (ITFS), based on the combination of ORDWT and Hilbert transform, is presented. For signal denoising applications, ORDWT is enhanced by neighboring coefficient shrinkage strategy as well as subband selection step to reveal the buried transient vibration contents. The proposed fault feature extraction technique is applied in a range of engineering applications, and the processing results demonstrate that the ORDWT-based feature extraction technique successfully identifies the incipient fault features in the cases where DWT and empirical mode decomposition method are less effective.