Planetary Gearbox Fault Diagnosis Using Envelope Manifold Demodulation

The important issue in planetary gear fault diagnosis is to extract the dependable fault characteristics from the noisy vibration signal of planetary gearbox. To address this critical problem, an envelope manifold demodulation method is proposed for planetary gear fault detection in the paper. This method combines complex wavelet, manifold learning, and frequency spectrogram to implement planetary gear fault characteristic extraction. The vibration signal of planetary gear is demodulated by wavelet enveloping. The envelope energy is adopted as an indicator to select meshing frequency band. Manifold learning is utilized to reduce the effect of noise within meshing frequency band. The fault characteristic frequency of the planetary gear is shown by spectrogram. The planetary gearbox model and test rig are established and experiments with planet gear faults are conducted for verification. All results of experiment analysis demonstrate its effectiveness and reliability.