A fast filtering method based on adaptive impulsive wavelet for the gear fault diagnosis

The useful fault features applied for the fault diagnosis are usually overwhelmed by noise and other interference factors in rotation machinery. The impulses masked in vibration signals can represent the faults of gears or bearings in a gearbox. The key to finding impulsive components is to identify the modeling parameters (such as damping ratio, central frequency) of a transient (Morlet wavelet, Laplace wavelet), which can be used as an adaptive filter to denoise the vibration signal. However, its engineering application is limited by the time-consuming computation. In order to tackle this issue, a fast algorithm based on an adaptive impulsive wavelet is proposed to filter the fault signal so that the fault characteristic frequency can be identified. Firstly, a correlation coefficient maximum criterion is employed to find one of the optimal parameters of the impulsive wavelet. Then, the other parameter is optimized by the minimum Shannon wavelet entropy criterion. Finally, the impulsive wavelet filter with optimal parameters is applied to extract the fault characteristic frequency. Simulation signals are applied to verify the efficiency of the proposed approach, and comparison analysis is conducted as well. Further, the proposed method is applied to detect the gear fault of a gearbox. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective with high efficiency.