Independence-oriented VMD to identify fault feature for wheel set bearing fault diagnosis of high speed locomotive

As one of most critical component of high-speed locomotive, wheel set bearing fault identification has attracted an increasing attention in recent years. However, non-stationary vibration signal with modulation phenomenon and heavy background noise make it difficult to excavate the hidden weak fault feature. Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD), which can decompose the non-stationary signal into couple Intrinsic Mode Functions adaptively and non-recursively, brings a feasible tool. However, heavy background noise seriously affects setting of mode number, which may lead to information loss or over decomposition problem. In this paper, an independence-oriented VMD method via correlation analysis is proposed to adaptively extract weak and compound fault feature of wheel set bearing. To overcome the information loss problem, the appropriate mode number is determined by the criterion of approximate complete reconstruction. Then the similar modes are combined according to the similarity of their envelopes to solve the over decomposition problem. Finally, three applications to wheel set bearing fault of high speed locomotive verify the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with original VMD, EMD and EEMD methods. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.