Blind vibration component separation and nonlinear feature extraction applied to the nonstationary vibration signals for the gearbox multi-fault diagnosis

Fault diagnosis of gearboxes, especially the gears and bearings, is of great importance to the long-term safe operation. An unexpected damage on the gearbox may break the whole transmission line down. It is therefore crucial for engineers and researchers to monitor the health condition of the gearbox in a timely manner to eliminate the impending faults. However, useful fault detection information is often submerged in heavy background noise. Thereby, a new fault detection method for gearboxes using the blind source separation (BSS) and nonlinear feature extraction techniques is presented in this paper. The nonstationary vibration signals were analyzed to reveal the operation state of the gearbox. The kernel independent component analysis (KICA) algorithm was used hereby as the BSS approach for the mixed observation signals of the gearbox vibration to discover the characteristic vibration source associated with the gearbox faults. Then the wavelet packet transform (WPT) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) nonlinear analysis methods were employed to deal with the nonstationary vibrations to extract the original fault feature vector. Moreover, the locally linear embedding (LLE) algorithm was performed as the nonlinear feature reduction technique to attain distinct features from the feature vector. Lastly, the fuzzy k-nearest neighbor (FKNN) was applied to the fault pattern identification of the gearbox. Two case studies were carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed diagnostic approach. One is for the gear fault diagnosis, and the other is to diagnose the rolling bearing faults of the gearbox. The nonstationary vibration data was acquired from the gear and rolling bearing fault test-beds, respectively. The experimental test results show that sensitive fault features can be extracted after the KICA processing, and the proposed diagnostic system is effective for the multi-fault diagnosis of the gears and rolling bearings. In addition, the proposed method can achieve higher performance than that without KICA processing with respect to the classification rate.