Subspace-based gearbox condition monitoring by kernel principal component analysis

Feature extraction is a key step for gearbox condition monitoring. The statistical features of the measured vibrations can be used to characterise gearbox conditions; however, their regularity and sensitivity in pattern space are different and may vary considerably under different operating conditions. This paper addresses the non-linear feature extraction scheme from the time-domain features with wavelet packet preprocessing and frequency-domain features of the vibration signals using the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA). Then two different KPCA-based subspace structures are constructed for representing and classifying the gearbox conditions. The proposed methods can extract the non-linear features of gearbox conditions using KPCA effectively, and perform conveniently with low computational complexity based on subspace methods. Experimental analysis with a fatigue test of an automobile transmission gearbox shows that the KPCA features outperform PCA features in terms of clustering capability, and both the two KPCA-based subspace methods can be effectively applied to gearbox condition monitoring.