Application of Reassigned Wavelet Scalogram in Wind Turbine Planetary Gearbox Fault Diagnosis under Nonstationary Conditions

Abstract

Wind turbine planetary gearboxes often run under nonstationary conditions due to volatile wind conditions, thus resulting in nonstationary vibration signals. Time-frequency analysis gives insight into the structure of an arbitrary nonstationary signal in joint time-frequency domain, but conventional time-frequency representations suffer from either time-frequency smearing or cross-term interferences. Reassigned wavelet scalogram has merits of fine time-frequency resolution and cross-term free nature but has very limited applications in machinery fault diagnosis. In this paper, we use reassigned wavelet scalogram to extract fault feature from wind turbine planetary gearbox vibration signals. Both experimental and in situ vibration signals are used to evaluate the effectiveness of reassigned wavelet scalogram in fault diagnosis of wind turbine planetary gearbox. For experimental evaluation, the gear characteristic instantaneous frequency curves on time-frequency plane are clearly pinpointed in both local and distributed sun gear fault cases. For in situ evaluation, the periodical impulses due to planet gear fault are also clearly identified. The results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of reassigned wavelet scalogram in planetary gearbox fault diagnosis under nonstationary conditions.