Weak fault feature extraction of gear based on KVMD and singular value difference spectrum

School of Mechanical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, People’s Republic of China

⁻ Corresponding author: lihk@dlut.edu.cn

Abstract

Gearbox is an important component of many industrial applications. When the gear fault occurs, the vibration signal is characterized by multi-component, multi-frequency modulation, low signal to noise ratio, weak fault characteristics and difficult to extract. This paper proposes a gear fault feature extraction method based on improved variational mode decomposition(VMD) and singular value difference spectrum. Firstly, the method is optimized for the decomposition level K of the VMD algorithm, and an improved method of VMD decomposition layer number K for central frequency screening (KVMD) is proposed. Then, the gear fault vibration signal is decomposed into a series of bandlimited intrinsic mode functions using KVMD. Due to the interference of the noise, it is difficult to make the correct judgment of fault in the spectrum of each mode component. According to the correlation coefficient criterion, the components with larger correlation coefficients are chosen to singular value decomposition. The singular value difference spectrum is obtained, and the effective order of the reconstructed signal is determined from the difference spectrum to denoise the signal; Finally, the processed signal is analyzed by Hilbert envelope. The fault characteristic frequency can be extracted accurately from the envelope spectrum. Through the analysis of the experimental data of gear fault, the results show that the method can effectively reduce the influence of the noise, and accurately realize the extraction of gear fault feature information.