Comparisons of MFDFA, EMD and WT by Neural Network, Mahalanobis Distance and SVM in Fault Diagnosis of Gearboxes

A method for gearbox fault diagnosis consists of feature extraction and fault identification. Many methods for feature extraction have been devised for exposing nature of vibration data of a defective gearbox. In addition, features extracted from gearbox vibration data are identified by various classifiers. However, existing literatures leave much to be desired in assessing performance of different combinatorial methods for gearbox fault diagnosis. To this end, this paper evaluated performance of several typical combinatorial methods for gearbox fault diagnosis by associating each of multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA), empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and wavelet transform (WT) with each of neural network (NN), Mahalanobis distance decision rules (MDDR) and support vector machine (SVM). Following this, performance of different combinatorial methods was compared using a group of gearbox vibration data containing slightly different fault patterns. The results indicate that MFDFA performs better in feature extraction of gearbox vibration data and SVM does the same in fault identification. Naturally, the method associating MFDFA with SVM shows huge potential for fault diagnosis of gearboxes. As a result, this paper can provide some useful information on construction of a method for gearbox fault diagnosis.