A Novel Intelligent Method for the Gear Fault Quantitative Diagnosis Based on GVMD and Adaptive NFV Extraction

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between the characteristic parameters and the working conditions is established under a specific condition, and it is no longer applicable to other conditions.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.