A gear fault diagnosis method based on variational mode decomposition and multi-scale discrete entropy

The decomposition number $K$ and penalty factor $\alpha $ in the variational mode decomposition (VMD) algorithm have a great influence on the decomposition effect and the accuracy of subsequent fault diagnosis. Therefore, a gear fault diagnosis method based on genetic mutation particle swarm optimization VMD and probabilistic neural network (GMPSO-VMD-PNN) algorithm is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the GMPSO algorithm is used to optimize the $[K,\alpha]$ parameter combination in the VMD algorithm, and the optimal $[K,\alpha]$ parameter combination of each gear fault vibration signal to be decomposed is selected. Then, the gear fault vibration signal is decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by VMD, and the sample entropy value of each IMFs is extracted to form the feature vector of subsequent fault diagnosis. Finally, the characteristic vector of gear fault vibration signal is input into PNN model, and gear fault is accurately classified. By comparing with fixed parameter VMD algorithm, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) algorithm, the superiority of this method in gear fault diagnosis is verified. Therefore, the GMPSO-VMD-PNN algorithm proposed in this paper has certain application value for gear fault diagnosis.

Machines learning models have recently been proposed for predicting rivers water temperature (Tw) using only air temperature (Ta). The proposed models relied on a nonlinear relationship between the Tw and Ta and they have proven to be robust modelling tools. The main motivation for this study was to evaluate how the variational mode decomposition (VMD) contributed to the improvement of machines learning performances for river Tw modelling. Measured data collected at five stations located in Poland from 1987 to 2014 were acquired and used for the analysis. Six machines learning models were used and compared namely, K-nearest neighbor's regression (KNNR), least square support vector machine (LSSVM), generalized regression neural network (GRNN), cascade correlation artificial neural networks (CCNN), relevance vector machine (RVM), and locally weighted polynomials regression (LWPR). The six models were developed according to three scenarios. First, the models were calibrated using only the Ta as input and obtained results show that the models were able to predict consistently water temperature, showing a high determination coefficient (R2) and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) with values near or above 0.910 and 0.915, respectively, and in overall the six models worked equally without clear superiority of one above another. Second, the air temperature was combined with the periodicity (i.e., day, month and year number) as input variable and a significant improvement was achieved. Both models show their ability to accurately predict river Tw with an overall accuracy of 0.956 for R2 and 0.955 for NSE values, but the LSSVM2 have some advantages such as a small errors metrics, and high fitting capabilities and it slightly surpasses the others models. Thirdly, air temperature was decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMF) using the VMD method and the performances of the models were evaluated. The VMD parameters appeared to cause much influence on the prediction accuracy, exhibiting an improvement of about 40.50% and 39.12% in terms of RMSE and MAE between the first and the third scenarios, however, some models, i.e., GRNN and KNNR have not benefited from the VMD. This research has demonstrated the high capability of the VMD algorithm as a preprocessing approach in improving the accuracies of the machine learning models for river water temperature prediction.

Feature extraction is one of the most important, pivotal, and difficult problems in mechanical fault diagnosis, which directly relates to the accuracy of fault diagnosis and the reliability of early fault prediction. Therefore, a new fault feature extraction method, called the EDOMFE method based on integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), mode selection, and multi-scale fuzzy entropy is proposed to accurately diagnose fault in this paper. The EEMD method is used to decompose the vibration signal into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with a different physical significance. The correlation coefficient analysis method is used to calculate and determine three improved IMFs, which are close to the original signal. The multi-scale fuzzy entropy with the ability of effective distinguishing the complexity of different signals is used to calculate the entropy values of the selected three IMFs in order to form a feature vector with the complexity measure, which is regarded as the inputs of the support vector machine (SVM) model for training and constructing a SVM classifier (EOMSMFD based on EDOMFE and SVM) for fulfilling fault pattern recognition. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by real bearing vibration signals of the motor with different loads and fault severities. The experiment results show that the proposed EDOMFE method can effectively extract fault features from the vibration signal and that the proposed EOMSMFD method can accurately diagnose the fault types and fault severities for the inner race fault, the outer race fault, and rolling element fault of the motor bearing. Therefore, the proposed method provides a new fault diagnosis technology for rotating machinery.

As the gear is one of the most critical components of the high-speed rotating machinery, the fault identification of the gear has attracted increasing attention recently. However, the nonlinear and non-stationary vibration signals with mode mixing phenomenon and heavy background noise make it difficult to excavate the hidden weak fault feature. Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD), which can decompose the non-linear and non-stationary signals into a couple of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) adaptively and non-recursively, bring a feasible tool. While the heavy background noise seriously affects the setting of the model number, which may lead to information loss or over decomposition problem. In this paper, a new improved VMD method, namely, Generalized Variational Mode Decomposition (GVMD) method is proposed to extract the fault characteristic information buried in the vibration signals adaptively. For the gear fault quantitative diagnosis, the corresponding relationship between the characteristic parameters and the working conditions is established under a specific condition, and it is no longer applicable to other conditions. Based on the dynamic model of the gear transmission system, the characteristic parameters that are sensitive and correlative to the gear tooth crack level, but not sensitive to the working conditions, can be extracted from the dynamic responses. Then the Normalized Feature Vector (NFV) can be formed with the extracted parameters. Based on the methods mentioned above, a novel intelligent method that combines the GVMD with NFV extraction to realize the quantitative diagnosis of the gear fault under variable working conditions is proposed. The NFV can be extracted from the experimental vibration signals preprocessed by the GVMD, and establish the relationship between the NFV and the gear tooth crack level. Then the quantitative diagnosis of the gear fault can be realized by the Support Vector Machine (SVM). The results show that the intelligent quantitative diagnosis method proposed in this paper is a potential quantitative diagnosis tool for the gear fault.

Planetary gearbox vibration signals have strong modulation features due to the amplitude modulation and frequency modulation (AM-FM) effect of gear faults, as well as the amplitude modulation (AM) effect of time-varying vibration transfer paths, on gear meshing vibrations. This results in an involute sidebands structure in Fourier spectrum, possibly misleading fault diagnosis. The modulating frequency of both amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) parts is closely related to the gear fault characteristic frequency. This inspires the idea of joint amplitude and frequency demodulation analysis, thus addressing the complex sidebands issue inherent in Fourier spectrum. Demodulation analysis requires mono-component signals for accurate estimation of instantaneous frequency, and proper selection of an AM-FM component sensitive to gear fault. To this end, we firstly decompose the complex signal into intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) via variational mode decomposition (VMD), by exploiting its capability in decomposing complex modulated signal into constituent AM-FM components. For effective application of VMD in complex planetary gearbox signal analysis, we propose a method to determine a key parameter in VMD, i.e. the number of IMFs to be separated. For accurate instantaneous frequency estimation, we decompose IMFs via empirical AM-FM decomposition, to remove the influence of AM on instantaneous frequency estimation. Then, we select the sensitive IMF that contains the main gear fault information for further demodulation analysis. In order to properly select the sensitive IMF, we propose a criterion based on the gear vibration characteristics and the VMD properties. Finally, we obtain the amplitude and frequency demodulated spectra by applying Fourier transform to the amplitude envelope and instantaneous frequency of the selected sensitive IMF. According to the characteristics exhibited in the demodulated spectra, we can detect planetary gearbox fault. The proposed method is illustrated via a numerical simulated planetary gearbox vibration signal, and is further validated using lab experimental vibration signals of a planetary gearbox. Faults on all the three types of gear (sun, planet and ring) are successfully identified.

Aimed at the non-stationary characteristics of rolling bearing vibration signal,a fault diagnosis method was proposed based on local-wave method and KPCA(kernel principal component analysis)-LSSVM(least squares support vector machine).Firstly,local wave decomposition was used to decompose rolling bearing vibration signal into several intrinsic mode function(IMF),whose feature energy,singular values and AR model parameters were computed as initial feature vectors.Secondly,ini tial feature vectors were mapped into a higher-dimensional space with KPCA,and the kemel principal components were extracted as new feature vectors,which used as the input of LSSVM for fault classification.The experimental results show the KPCA-LSSVM method improves LSSVM's classification performance by KPCA obtaining additional discriminative information,and has better generalization than direct LSSVM method,and can identify rolling bearing fault patterns more accurately.

Aiming to address the nonlinear and non-stationary characteristics of rolling bearing fault vibration signals, traditional diagnostic methods face challenges such as mode mixing, insufficient feature discrimination, and sensitivity to classifier parameters, which limit further improvements in diagnostic accuracy. This paper proposes a comprehensive optimization framework for fault diagnosis, covering signal decomposition and fault feature classification. First, improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN) is applied to decompose the signal into intrinsic mode functions (IMF), effectively suppressing mode mixing. Next, the correlation coefficient and multiscale permutation entropy (MPE) are employed to quantify the dynamic complexity of each IMF across multiple scales, enabling the extraction of highly discriminative multidimensional feature vectors. Finally, the black-winged kite algorithm (BKA) is used to optimize the penalty factor and kernel parameters of the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). BKA achieves a dynamic balance between local exploitation and global exploration, and its integration with Cauchy mutation improves robustness to noise, thereby enhancing convergence speed and stability. Experimental results from publicly available datasets and a custom experimental platform show that the proposed approach effectively distinguishes among various fault types, offering superior performance, improved interpretability, and enhanced robustness.

This paper introduces a fault diagnosis method for mine scraper conveyor gearbox gears using motor current signature analysis (MCSA). This approach solves problems related to gear fault characteristics that are affected by coal flow load and power frequency, which are difficult to extract efficiently. A fault diagnosis method is proposed based on variational mode decomposition (VMD)–Hilbert spectrum and ShuffleNet-V2. Firstly, the gear current signal is decomposed into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMF) by using VMD, and the sensitive parameters of VMD are optimized by using a genetic algorithm (GA). The Sensitive IMF algorithm judges the modal function sensitive to fault information after VMD processing. By analyzing the local Hilbert instantaneous energy spectrum for fault-sensitive IMF, an accurate expression of signal energy changing with time is obtained to generate the local Hilbert immediate energy spectrum dataset of different fault gears. Finally, ShuffleNet-V2 is used to identify the gear fault state. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the ShuffleNet-V2 neural network is 91.66% after 778 s.

A new denoising algorithm and feature extraction algorithm that combine a new kind of permutation entropy (NPE) and variational mode decomposition (VMD) are put forward in this paper. VMD is a new self-adaptive signal processing algorithm, which is more robust to sampling and noise, and also can overcome the problem of mode mixing in empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and ensemble EMD (EEMD). Permutation entropy (PE), as a nonlinear dynamics parameter, is a powerful tool that can describe the complexity of a time series. NPE, a new version of PE, is interpreted as distance to white noise, which shows a reverse trend to PE and has better stability than PE. In this paper, three kinds of ship-radiated noise (SN) signal are decomposed by VMD algorithm, and a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMF) are obtained. The NPEs of all the IMFs are calculated, the noise IMFs are screened out according to the value of NPE, and the process of denoising can be realized by reconstructing the rest of IMFs. Then the reconstructed SN signal is decomposed by VMD algorithm again, and one IMF containing the most dominant information is chosen to represent the original SN signal. Finally, NPE of the chosen IMF is calculated as a new complexity feature, which constitutes the input of the support vector machine (SVM) for pattern recognition of SN. Compared with the existing denoising algorithms and feature extraction algorithms, the effectiveness of proposed algorithms is validated using the numerical simulation signal and the different kinds of SN signal.

Aiming at the disadvantage that multi-scale entropy only analyzes the low-frequency components of time series, this paper proposes a rolling bearing fault feature extraction method based on hierarchical dispersion entropy (HDE). Firstly, the HDE is constructed based on the hierarchical operators and dispersion entropy. Secondly, the influence of HDE parameters on entropy stability is studied. Finally, the fault diagnosis method based on HDE, least square support vector machine is applied in rolling bearings. The experiment results show that the proposed method can distinguish different types of the rolling bearing faults. It owns the higher fault diagnosis accuracy than the traditional multi scale entropy methods, such as multi-scale sample entropy (MSE), multi-scale dispersion entropy (MDE).

Rolling bearings are the key components of rotating machinery. Incipient fault diagnosis of bearing plays an increasingly important role in guaranteeing normal and safe operation of rotating machinery. However, because of the high complexity of the fault feature extraction, the incipient faults of rolling bearings are difficult to diagnose. To solve this problem, this paper presents a new incipient fault intelligent identification method of rolling bearings based on variational mode decomposition (VMD), principal component analysis (PCA), and support vector machines (SVM). In the proposed method, the bearing vibration signals are decomposed by using VMD, and a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with different frequencies are obtained. Then, the energy and kurtosis values of each IMF are calculated to reveal the intrinsic characteristics of the vibration signals in different scales. Finally, all energy and kurtosis values of IMFs are processed via PCA and subsequently fed into SVM to achieve the bearing fault identification automatically. The effectiveness of this method is verified through the experimental bearing data. The verification results indicate that the proposed method can effectively extract the bearing fault features and accurately identify the bearing incipient faults, and outperform the two compared methods obviously in identification accuracy and computation time.

To enhance the precision of rolling bearing fault diagnosis, an intelligent hybrid approach is proposed in this paper for signal processing and fault diagnosis in small samples. This approach is based on advanced techniques, combining parameter optimization variational mode decomposition weighted by multiscale permutation entropy (MPE) with maximal information coefficient and multi-target attention convolutional neural networks (MTACNN). First, an improved variational mode decomposition (VMD) is developed to denoise the raw signal. The whale optimization algorithm was used to optimize the penalty factor and mode component number in the VMD algorithm to obtain several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Second, separate MPE calculations are performed for both the raw signal and each of the IMF components obtained from the VMD decomposition; the results are used to calculate the maximum information coefficient (MIC). Subsequently, each MIC is normalized and converted to a weight coefficient for signal reconstruction. Ultimately, the reconstructed signals serve as input to the MTACNN for diagnosing rolling bearing faults. Results demonstrate that the signal processing approach exhibits superior noise reduction capability through simple processing. Furthermore, compared to several similar approaches, The method proposed for fault diagnosis achieves superior performance levels in the fault pattern recognition target and the fault severity recognition target.

This paper proposes a novel method to improve the variational mode decomposition (VMD) method and to automatically acquire the sensitive intrinsic mode function (IMF). First, since fault signals are impulsive and periodic, a weighted autocorrelative function maximum (AFM) indicator is constructed based on the Gini index and autocorrelation function to serve as the optimization objective function. The mode number K and the penalty parameter α of VMD are automatically obtained through an optimal parameter searching process underpinned by the improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with a variety of inertia weights. This improvement solves one of the major drawbacks of the conventional VMD method, that is, the need to manually set parameters. Then, an optimal IMF automatic selecting process is performed for single-failure faults and compound faults, according to the principles of the maximum weighted AFM indicator and maximum spectrum peak ratio (SPR), respectively. The sensitive IMFs are then subjected to an envelope demodulation analysis to obtain the fault characteristic frequency. The results of simulations and experiments show that the proposed method can effectively identify fault characteristics early, especially compound faults, demonstrating great potential for real-world applications.

Variational mode decomposition is a new signal decomposition method, which can process non-linear and non-stationary signals. It can overcome the problems of mode mixing and compensate for the shortcomings in empirical mode decomposition. Permutation entropy is a method which can detect the randomness and kinetic mutation behavior of a time series. It can be considered for use in fault diagnosis. The complexity of wind power generation systems means that the randomness and kinetic mutation behavior of their vibration signals are displayed at different scales. Multi-scale permutation entropy analysis is therefore needed for such vibration signals. This research investigated a method based on variational mode decomposition and permutation entropy for the fault diagnosis of a wind turbine roller bearing. Variational mode decomposition was adopted to decompose the bearing vibration signal into its constituent components. The components containing key fault information were selected for the extraction of their permutation entropy. This entropy was used as a bearing fault characteristic value. The nearest neighbor algorithm was employed as a classifier to identify faults in a roller bearing. The experimental data showed that the proposed method can be applied to wind turbine roller bearing fault diagnosis.

An optimized VMD method and its applications in bearing fault diagnosis