A new strategy of instantaneous angular speed extraction and its application to multistage gearbox fault diagnosis

Owing to its unique benefits, Instantaneous Angular Speed (IAS) has become the focus of a great deal of research for monitoring mechanical parts of rotating machines in the past few years. However, the efficacy of IAS-based signal processing techniques essentially depends on the estimation method of IAS and the complexity of the mechanical system. When it is applied to complex systems like turbines, gearboxes, conventional IAS itself still has some flaws and insufficiencies such as longer data stream, quantization noise and structural noise. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes an alternative IAS estimation approach named Instantaneous Angular Phase Demodulation (IAPD) IAS together with an improved procedure involving signal reconstruction, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and envelope analysis. Thereafter, two kinds of multistage gearboxes under different working conditions are developed to experimentally demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the new IAS measurement. Analysis results suggest that the quantization noise can be significantly reduced or even avoided in the IAPD-IAS signal compared with the conventional IAS signal. Moreover, by means of the new procedure, the computational efficiency can be greatly improved and fault characteristics are dramatically enhanced in the envelope spectrum where deterministic frequency component and its harmonics corresponding to fault characteristics are displayed clearly.