Joint High-Order Synchrosqueezing Transform and Multi-Taper Empirical Wavelet Transform for Fault Diagnosis of Wind Turbine Planetary Gearbox under Nonstationary Conditions

Wind turbines usually operate under nonstationary conditions, such as wide-range speed fluctuation and time-varying load. Its critical component, the planetary gearbox, is prone to malfunction or failure, which leads to downtime and repair costs. Therefore, fault diagnosis and condition monitoring f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2018-01, Vol.18 (1), p.150
Main Authors: Hu, Yue, Tu, Xiaotong, Li, Fucai, Meng, Guang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Critical components
Downtime
empirical wavelet transform
Fault diagnosis
Gear trains
Masking
Meshing
multi-taper
synchrosqueezing transform
time-frequency analysis
Variation
Vibration measurement
Wavelet transforms
wind turbine gearbox
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Summary:Wind turbines usually operate under nonstationary conditions, such as wide-range speed fluctuation and time-varying load. Its critical component, the planetary gearbox, is prone to malfunction or failure, which leads to downtime and repair costs. Therefore, fault diagnosis and condition monitoring for the planetary gearbox in wind turbines is a vital research topic. Meanwhile, the signals measured by the vibration sensors mounted in the gearbox exhibit time-varying and nonstationary features. In this study, a novel time-frequency method based on high-order synchrosqueezing transform (SST) and multi-taper empirical wavelet transform (MTEWT) is proposed for the wind turbine planetary gearbox under nonstationary conditions. The high-order SST uses accurate instantaneous frequency approximations to obtain a sharper time-frequency representation (TFR). As the acquired signal consists of many components, like the meshing and rotating components of the gear and bearing, the fault component may be masked by other unrelated components. The MTEWT is used to separate the fault feature from the masking components. A variety of experimental signals of the wind turbine planetary gearbox under nonstationary conditions have been analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method is effective in diagnosing both gear and bearing faults.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s18010150