Partial ensemble approach to resolve the mode mixing of extreme-point weighted mode decomposition

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is an effective tool for breaking down components (modes) of a nonlinear and non-stationary signal. Recently, a newly adaptive signal decomposition method, namely extreme-point weighted mode decomposition (EWMD), was put forward to improve the performance of EMD, in particular, to resolve the over- or undershooting issue associated with the large amplitude variations. However, similar to EMD, EWMD also suffers the mode mixing problem caused by intermittence or noisy signals. In this paper, inspired by complementary ensemble EMD (CEEMD), a noise-assisted data analysis method called partial ensemble extreme-point weighted mode decomposition (PEEWMD) is proposed to eliminate the mode mixing problem and enhance the performance of EWMD. In the proposed PEEWMD method, firstly white noises in pairs are added to the targeted signal and then the noisy signals are decomposed using the EWMD method to obtain the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) in the first several stages. Secondly, permutation entropy is employed to detect the components that cause mode mixing. The residual signal is obtained after the identified components are separated from the original signal. Lastly, the residual signal is fully decomposed by using the EWMD method. The proposed PEEWMD method is compared with original EWMD, ensemble EWMD (EEWMD) and CEEMD using simulated signals. The results demonstrate that PEEWMD can effectively restrain the mode mixing issue and generates IMFs with much better performance. Based on that the PEEWMD and envelope power spectrum based fault diagnosis method was proposed and applied to the rubbing fault identification of rotor system and the fault diagnosis of rolling bearing with inner race. The result indicates that the proposed method of fault diagnosis gets much better effect than EMD and EWMD.