Undecimated multiwavelet and Hilbert-Huang time-frequency analysis and its application in the incipient fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes

A denoising method of the improved neighboring coefficients and the undecimated multiwavelet transform is proposed, Hilbert-Huang time-frequency analysis is applied as the post-processing method. The proposed method is applied to the incipient fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes. In the planetary gearbox, the fault response is quite weak; the vibration is obviously non-stationary and evidently nonlinear; low-frequency characteristics are easily immersed in heavy noise. Therefore, the existing fault diagnosis theory and technology for traditional fixed-shaft gearboxes fail to solve the difficulty in the planetary gearbox fault diagnosis. The undecimated multiwavelet transform has the shift-invariant property in time domain, which can effectively weaken the Gibbs phenomena in the neighborhood of the discontinuities. The improved neighboring coefficients can select variant sizes of neighboring window and flexible thresholds at different decomposition levels, which can correctly extract the incipient fault features in the non-stationary signals. Hilbert-Huang time-frequency analysis can intuitively represent the non-stationary and nonlinear features of the collected signals. Experiments indicate that the proposed method can correctly extract the weak fault features caused by the incipient pitting defects in the planetary gearbox.