Gearbox Fault Feature Extraction Using Hilbert Transform, S-Transform, and a Statistical Indicator

Abstract

Abstract Vibration analysis has been widely used in machine fault feature extraction and diagnosis of rotating machinery. The effects of modulation and nonstationarity in vibration signals collected from a faulty gearbox present challenges for fault feature extraction. Hilbert transform and S-transform have the ability to address these issues through demodulation and time-frequency analysis, respectively. In this paper, we propose to use a feature indicator to represent the S-transform coefficients. The proposed method integrates the advantages of Hilbert transform, S-transform, and the proposed feature indicator (FI). The validity of the proposed method is verified with a simulated signal and real gearbox vibration signals. Comparison studies show that the proposed method is more effective and does not require the operators to have a lot of diagnostic experience.