Application of Hermitian wavelet to crack fault detection in gearbox

The continuous wavelet transform enables one to look at the evolution in the time scale joint representation plane. This advantage makes it very suitable for the detection of singularity generated by localized defects in the mechanical system. However, most of the applications of the continuous wavelet transform have widely focused on the use of Morlet wavelet transform. The complex Hermitian wavelet is constructed based on the first and the second derivatives of the Gaussian function to detect signal singularities. The Fourier spectrum of Hermitian wavelet is real; therefore, Hermitian wavelet does not affect the phase of a signal in the complex domain. This gives a desirable ability to extract the singularity characteristic of a signal precisely. In this study, Hermitian wavelet is used to diagnose the gear localized crack fault. The simulative and experimental results show that Hermitian wavelet can extract the transients from strong noise signals and can effectively diagnose the localized gear fault.