New gear fault diagnosis method based on MODWPT and neural network for feature extraction and classification

Abstract

Gear fault diagnosis using vibration signals has become the subject of intensive studies to detect any sudden failure. However, these signals exhibit nonlinear and nonstationary behaviors when the rotating machine operates under multiple working conditions. Furthermore, fault features extraction and classification of multiple gear states are always unsatisfactory and considered as a huge task. This is the main reason that motivates us to develop a new intelligent gear fault diagnosis method in order to automatically identify and classify several kinds of gear defects under different work conditions. So in this article, we propose a combination between the maximal overlap discrete wavelet packet transform (MODWPT), entropy indicator, and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network as a new automatic fault diagnosis approach. MODWPT decomposes the data signal into several components using a uniform frequency bandwidth. Each decomposed component is selected to extract feature vector using entropy indicator. Finally, MLP provides a powerful automatic tool for identifying and classifying the aforementioned extracted features. Experimental vibration signals of healthy gear; gear with general surface wear; gear with chipped tooth in length; gear with chipped tooth in width; gear with missing tooth; and gear with tooth root crack are recorded under fifteen different work conditions to test the effectiveness of the suggested technique. Experimental results affirm that our proposed approach can successfully detect, identify, and classify the gear fault pattern in all cases