Incipient Fault Feature Extraction for Rotating Machinery Based on Improved AR-Minimum Entropy Deconvolution Combined with Variational Mode Decomposition Approach

Aiming at the issue of extracting the incipient single-fault and multi-fault of rotating machinery from the nonlinear and non-stationary vibration signals with a strong background noise, a new fault diagnosis method based on improved autoregressive-Minimum entropy deconvolution (improved AR-MED) and variational mode decomposition (VMD) is proposed. Due to the complexity of rotating machinery systems, the periodic transient impulses of single-fault and multiple-faults always emerge in the acquired vibration signals. The improved autoregressive minimum entropy deconvolution (AR-MED) technique can effectively deconvolve the influence of the background noise, which aims to enhance the peak value of the multiple transient impulses. Nevertheless, the envelope spectrum of simulation and experimental in this work shows that there are many interference components exist on both left and right of fault characteristic frequencies when the background noise is strong. To overcome this shortcoming, the VMD is thus applied to adaptively decompose the filtered output vibration signal into a number of quasi-orthogonal intrinsic modes so as to better detect the single- and multiple-faults via those sub-band signals. The experimental and engineering application results demonstrate that the proposed method dramatically sharpens the fault characteristic frequencies (FCFs) from the impacts of bearing outer race and gearbox faults compared to the traditional methods, which show a significant improvement in early incipient faults of rotating machinery.