Information Reconstruction Method for Improved Clustering and Diagnosis of Generic Gearbox Signals

Gearbox is a very complex mechanical system that can generate vibrations from its various elements such as gears, shafts, and bearings. Transmission path effect, signal coupling, and noise contamination can further induce difficulties to the development of a prognostics and health management (PHM) system for a gearbox. This paper introduces a novel information reconstruction approach to clustering and diagnosis of gearbox signals in varying operating conditions. First, vibration signal is transformed from time domain to frequency domain with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Then, reconstruction filters are employed to sift the frequency components in FFT spectrum to retain the information of interest. Features are further extracted to calculate the coefficients of the reconstructed energy expression. Then, correlation analysis (CA) and distance measurement (DM) techniques are utilized to cluster signals under diverse shaft speeds and loads. Finally, energy coefficients are used as health indicators for the purpose of fault diagnosis of the rotating elements in the gearbox. The proposed method was used to solve the gearbox problem of the 2009 PHM Conference Data Analysis Competition and won with the best score in both professional and student categories.