Research on gearbox impact feature extraction method based on improved ESMD

Abstract

A gearbox vibration signal contains non-linear impact characteristics and the significant feature information tends to be overwhelmed by other interference components, which make it difficult to extract the typical fault features fully and effectively. Aiming at the key issue of how to effectively extract the impact characteristics, a fault diagnosis method based on improved extreme symmetric mode decomposition (ESMD) and a support vector machine (SVM) is proposed in this paper. The vibration signal is adaptively decomposed into multiple intrinsic mode function (IMF) components by the improved ESMD and then a certain number of components are selected with the maximum kurtosis-envelope spectrum index. The singular spectral entropy, energy entropy and permutation entropy of each component are applied to construct the feature vector set, in which the dimensionality of the set is reduced with the distance separability criterion. Finally, the dimension-reduced feature vector set is input into the SVM for pattern recognition. Dynamic simulation and experimental gearbox research show that the improved ESMD method can extract and identify gearbox fault information effectively.