Construction of customized redundant multiwavelet via increasing multiplicity for fault detection of rotating machinery

Fault detection from the vibration measurement data of rotating machinery is significant for avoiding serious accidents. However, non-stationary vibration signal with a large amount of noise makes this task challenging. Multiwavelet not only owns the advantage on multi-resolution analysis but also can offer multiple wavelet basis functions. So it has the possibility of detecting various fault features preferably. However, the fixed basis functions which are not related to the given signal may lower the accuracy of fault detection. Moreover, another major intrinsic deficiency of multiwavelet lies in its critically sampled filter-bank, which causes shift-variance and is harmful to extract the feature of periodical impulses. To overcome these deficiencies, a new method called customized redundant multiwavelet (CRM) is constructed via increasing multiplicity (IM). IM is a simple method to design a series of changeable multiwavelet which are available for the subsequent optimization process. By the rule of the envelope spectrum entropy minimum principle, optimal multiwavelet is searched for. Based on the customized multiwavelet filters, the filters of CRM can be calculated by inserting zeros. The proposed method is applied to analyze the simulation, gearbox and rolling element bearing vibration signals. Compared with some other conventional methods, the results demonstrate that the proposed method possesses robust performance in detecting fault features of rotating machinery. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.