Iterative Laplace of Gaussian filter and improved Teager energy operator for bearing fault detection in gearboxes

Abstract

Abstract The presence of cyclic impulses is considered to be a significant indicator of bearing defects. The extraction of fault-related information from gearboxes, however, poses a significant challenge due to the complex working conditions in gear transmission systems. These conditions often lead to fault-related impulse features being masked by inevitable background noise and vibration components. To address this issue, a novel iterative Laplace of Gaussian (LoG) filtering technique is proposed for the fault diagnosis field of bearings in gearboxes. An objective function incorporating Kurtosis statistics is used to iteratively update LoG coefficients instead of relying on fixed coefficients as in the original version, making the iterative LoG filtering technique better suited for handling fault-induced impact signals. Furthermore, an improved Teager energy operator (TEO) is developed to reduce the susceptibility of the original TEO to noise. The improvement involves incorporating a multi-resolution symmetric difference sequence into the discrete expression of TEO. This symmetric difference acts as a translation-invariant, sliding-window filter that, when combined with an energy operator, enables both energy detection and frequency filtering. The robustness against noise and sensitivity to frequency can be further improved by adjusting the multi-resolution parameter. The results of the experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in identifying weak bearing fault features for gearboxes. Besides, the proposed method is also compared with the original LoG filter-based method and some competing methods, demonstrating its superior performance.