Rotating machines have been widely used in industrial engineering. The fault diagnosis of rotating machines plays a vital important role to reduce the catastrophic failures and heavy economic loss. However, the measured vibration signal of rotating machinery often represents non-linear and non-stationary characteristics, resulting in difficulty in the fault feature extraction. As a statistical measure, entropy can quantify the complexity and detect dynamic change through taking into account the non-linear behavior of time series. Therefore, entropy can be served as a promising tool to extract the dynamic characteristics of rotating machines. Recently, many studies have applied entropy in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. This paper aims to investigate the applications of entropy for the fault characteristics extraction of rotating machines. First, various entropy methods are briefly introduced. Its foundation, application, and some improvements are described and discussed. The review is divided into eight parts: Shannon entropy, Renyi entropy, approximate entropy, sample entropy, fuzzy entropy, permutation entropy, and other entropy methods. In each part, we will review the applications using the original entropy method and the improved entropy methods, respectively. In the end, a summary and some research prospects are given.

The Entropy Algorithm and Its Variants in the Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery: A Review

A Compound fault signal usually contains multiple characteristic signals and strong confusion noise, which makes it difficult to separate week fault signals from them through conventional ways, such as FFT-based envelope detection, wavelet transform or empirical mode decomposition individually. In order to improve the compound faults diagnose of rolling bearings via signals’ separation, the present paper proposes a new method to identify compound faults from measured mixed-signals, which is based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method and independent component analysis (ICA) technique. With the approach, a vibration signal is firstly decomposed into intrinsic mode functions (IMF) by EEMD method to obtain multichannel signals. Then, according to a cross correlation criterion, the corresponding IMF is selected as the input matrix of ICA. Finally, the compound faults can be separated effectively by executing ICA method, which makes the fault features more easily extracted and more clearly identified. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in compound fault separating, which works not only for the outer race defect, but also for the rollers defect and the unbalance fault of the experimental system.

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A Compound fault diagnosis for rolling bearings method based on blind source separation and ensemble empirical mode decomposition.

Extraction of the weak fault features under strong background noise is crucial to early fault diagnosis in bearings. A new method called local mean decomposition (LMD)-based multilayer hybrid denoising (LMD-MHD) is proposed for signal denoising in this paper. LMD is a novel self-adaptive time-frequency analysis method. It can decompose the signal into a set of product functions (PFs), and is thus particularly suitable for processing of multicomponent amplitude-modulated and frequency-modulated signals. The first filtering layer of LMD-MHD is to use a multiple criteria decision to select the effective PF components. The second filtering layer is to use the wavelet threshold denoising (WTD) as the prefilter of singular value decomposition (SVD) implementation, which enables the preserved singular values to consist of the most important information of the PFs. The final denoising layer of LMD-MHD is to use SVD to extract the most important principal features from Hankel matrix of the PFs. The order of effective ranks of the Hankel matrix is determined by the number of main frequencies in the fast Fourier transformation (FFT) result of the signal. The filtering is finished based on the reconstructed signal from the decomposition result of SVD. The results of experimental analysis on the simulation signals and vibration signal collected from rolling bearings indicate that LMD-MHD is effective for extracting the weak fault features and performs well for bearing fault diagnosis.

Weak Fault Feature Extraction of Rolling Bearings Using Local Mean Decomposition-Based Multilayer Hybrid Denoising

In the condition monitoring of roller bearings, the measured signals are often compounded due to the unknown multi-vibration sources and complex transfer paths. Moreover, the sensors are limited in particular locations and numbers. Thus, this is a problem of underdetermined blind source separation for the vibration sources estimation, which makes it difficult to extract fault features exactly by ordinary methods in running tests. To improve the effectiveness of compound fault diagnosis in roller bearings, the present paper proposes a new method to solve the underdetermined problem and to extract fault features based on variational mode decomposition. In order to surmount the shortcomings of inadequate signals collected through limited sensors, a vibration signal is firstly decomposed into a number of band-limited intrinsic mode functions by variational mode decomposition. Then, the demodulated signal with the Hilbert transform of these multi-channel functions is used as the input matrix for independent component analysis. Finally, the compound faults are separated effectively by carrying out independent component analysis, which enables the fault features to be extracted more easily and identified more clearly. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in compound fault separation, and a comparison experiment shows that the proposed method has higher adaptability and practicability in separating strong noise signals than the commonly-used ensemble empirical mode decomposition method.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/16/6/897/pdf

Underdetermined Blind Source Separation with Variational Mode Decomposition for Compound Roller Bearing Fault Signals.

Multi-fault diagnosis of gearbox based on resonance-based signal sparse decomposition and comb filter

gear transmission system is a complex non-stationary and nonlinear time-varying coupling system. When faults occur on gear system, it is difficult to extract the fault feature. This paper researches the threshold principle in the process of using the wavelet transform to de-noise the system, and combines EMD (empirical mode decomposition) with wavelet threshold de-noising to solve the problem. The wavelet threshold de-noising is acts on the high-frequency IMF (Intrinsic Mode Function) component of the signal, and does overcome the defect by simply highlighting the fault feature. On this basis, the pre-processed signal is analyzed by the method of time-frequency analysis to extract the feature of the signal. The result shows that the SNR (signal-noise ratio) of the signal was largely improved, and the fault feature of the signal can therefore be effectively extracted. Combined with time-frequency analyses in the different running conditions (300 rpm, 900 rpm), various faults such as tooth root crack, tooth wear and multi-fault can be identified effectively. Based on this theory and combining the merits of MATLAB and VC

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Multi-Fault Feature Extraction and Diagnosis of Gear Transmission System Using Time-Frequency Analysis and Wavelet Threshold De-Noising Based on EMD

Higher order cumulants (HOC) is a new kind of modern signal analysis of theory and technology. Spectrum entropy clustering (SEC) is a data mining method of statistics, extracting useful characteristics from a mass of nonlinear and non-stationary data. Following a discussion on the characteristics of HOC theory and SEC method in this paper, the study of signal processing techniques and the unique merits of nonlinear coupling characteristic analysis in processing random and non-stationary signals are introduced. Also, a new clustering analysis and diagnosis method is proposed for detecting multi-damage on gear by introducing the combination of HOC and SEC into the damage-detection and diagnosis of the gear system. The noise is restrained by HOC and by extracting coupling features and separating the characteristic signal at different speeds and frequency bands. Under such circumstances, the weak signal characteristics in the system are emphasized and the characteristic of multi-fault is extracted. Adopting a data-mining method of SEC conducts an analysis and diagnosis at various running states, such as the speed of 300 r/min, 900 r/min, 1200 r/min, and 1500 r/min of the following six signals: no-fault, short crack-fault in tooth root, long crack-fault in tooth root, short crack-fault in pitch circle, long crack-fault in pitch circle, and wear-fault on tooth. Research shows that this combined method of detection and diagnosis can also identify the degree of damage of some faults. On this basis, the virtual instrument of the gear system which detects damage and diagnoses faults is developed by combining with advantages of MATLAB and VC++, employing component object module technology, adopting mixed programming methods, and calling the program transformed from an *.m file under VC++. This software system possesses functions of collecting and introducing vibration signals of gear, analyzing and processing signals, extracting features, visualizing graphics, detecting and diagnosing faults, detecting and monitoring, etc. Finally, the results of testing and verifying show that the developed system can effectively be used to detect and diagnose faults in an actual operating gear transmission system.

Renping Shao

Papers

Multi-Fault Feature Extraction and Diagnosis of Gear Transmission System Using Time-Frequency Analysis and Wavelet Threshold De-Noising Based on EMD

Multi-fault clustering and diagnosis of gear system mined by spectrum entropy clustering based on higher order cumulants.