Early bolt looseness state identification via generalized variational mode decomposition and similarity index

A novel method for early looseness state identification of bolted joint beams is proposed in this paper based on generalized variational mode decomposition (GVMD) and a similarity index. In the proposed method vibration signals are decomposed by GVMD, which has the property of the multiscale and fixed-frequency decomposition. To effectively extract the desired modes, the frequency band allocation is designed through flexibly defining scale parameters and prior center frequencies according to the characteristics of the signal itself and real needs. A new similarity index is formed based on the centroid frequency ratio of sensitive vibration modes to reliably identify early looseness state. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by impulse experiments of bolted joint transverse beam and bolted joint vertical beam. The results indicate that compared with other methods, the proposed method can effectively identify the early looseness state of the bolted joint beams, and has a good repeatability.