Fault Impact Extraction for Planetary Gearbox Using Motor Current

As the widely used transmission components, planetary gearboxes are prone to failure because of working under heavy loads. Hence, fault diagnosis is a key to guaranteeing the reliability of planetary gearboxes. In this field, motor current signal analysis (MCSA) is a new rising technology. Traditional MCSA just focuses on spectrum identification. However, the local spectrum is masked by other components in the global spectrum and is hard to identify. Therefore, it is necessary to research novel methods to extract fault impact from motor current. In this article, a new variational mode decomposition based adaptive comb filtering method is introduced to extract fault impacts from motor current. Then, experiments are carried out to validate the performance. The results show that the variational mode decomposition based adaptive comb filtering can extract fault impact from motor current efficaciously.