A novel gearbox fault feature extraction and classification using Hilbert empirical wavelet transform, singular value decomposition, and SOM neural network

There are growing demands for condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of rotating machinery to lower unscheduled breakdown. Gearboxes are one of the fundamental components of rotating machinery; their faults identification and classification always draw a lot of attention. However, non-stationary vibration signals and low energy of weak faults makes this task challenging in many cases. Thus, a new fault diagnosis method which combines the Hilbert empirical wavelet transform (HEWT), singular value decomposition (SVD), and self-organizing feature map (SOM) neural network is proposed in this paper. HEWT, a new self-adaptive time-frequency analysis was applied to the vibration signals to obtain the instantaneous amplitude matrices. Then, the singular value vectors, as the fault feature vectors were acquired by applying the SVD. Last, the SOM was used for automatic gearbox fault identification and classification. An electromechanical model comprising an induction motor coupled with a single stage spur gearbox is considered where the vibration signals of four typical operation modes were simulated. The conditions include the healthy gearbox, input shaft slant crack, tooth cracking, and tooth surface pitting. Obtained results show that the proposed method effectively identifies the gearbox faults at an early stage and realizes automatic fault diagnosis. Moreover, performance evaluation and comparison between the proposed HEWT–SVD method and Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT)–SVD approach show that the HEWT–SVD is better for feature extraction.