Sparse representation of transients in wavelet basis and its application in gearbox fault feature extraction

Vibration signals from a defective gearbox are often associated with important measurement information useful for gearbox fault diagnosis. The extraction of transient features from the vibration signals has always been a key issue for detecting the localized fault. In this paper, a new transient feature extraction technique is proposed for gearbox fault diagnosis based on sparse representation in wavelet basis. With the proposed method, both the impulse time and the period of transients can be effectively identified, and thus the transient features can be extracted. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the simulated signals as well as the practical gearbox vibration signals. Comparison study shows that the proposed method outperforms empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in transient feature extraction. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.