A Methodology to Handle Spectral Smearing in Gearboxes Using Adaptive Mode Decomposition and Dynamic Time Warping

Tacho-less order tracking is an effective tool for fault detection in gearboxes operating under speed fluctuations. This technique's performance depends on extracting instantaneous shaft speed information from a complex multicomponent gearbox signal, which is first preprocessed by a bandpass filter. However, spectral overlap resulting from the time-varying frequency components makes it challenging to isolate the shaft speed harmonic mono-component using this approach. In order to overcome such issues, an adaptive tacho-less order-tracking (OT) method combining the variational mode decomposition (VMD) and the fast dynamic time warping (FDTW) is proposed in this article. The proposed method first decomposes the measured gearbox vibration signal using VMD to estimate the instantaneous shaft speed profile to construct the shaft vibration signal. The gearbox vibration signal is then resampled based on the optimal warping path obtained by FDTW, which performs an “elastic” stretching and compression along the time axis of the extracted shaft vibration signal with respect to a sinusoidal reference signal with a constant shaft rotational frequency. Finally, the presence of gear fault is detected by constructing the order spectrum of the resampled vibration signal. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using both simulation analysis and experimental validation using measurements from two different wind-turbine gearboxes collected under test and field conditions, respectively.