Gear fault diagnosis based on central tendency measure of intrinsic mode functions

Abstract

Fault detection of gear is very crucial to avoid unexpected breakdown of machineries having gearbox. Vibration signal coming out of gearbox can be used for analysis in order to find gear fault at early stage. The various analysis methods based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) have been used for gear fault diagnosis in mechanical systems. The EMD method represents an original signal as a linear combination of finite band-limited signals in time domain. These bandlimited signals are known as intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The analytic signal representation of IMFs exhibits circular pattern in complex plane. The central tendency measure (CTM) quantifies the degree of variabily in IMFs of vibration signal. The CTM parameter has been used to measure the variability present in IMFs in order to detect fault in the early stage. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for gear fault diagnosis.