Exchanged ridge demodulation of time-scale manifold for enhanced fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

• An improved time-scale manifold (TSM) ridge demodulation method is proposed.
• The new method combines the benefits of the first two TSMs.
• The parameters of Morlet wavelet are optimized for TSM learning.
• The in-band noise can be eliminated in the extracted envelope.
• The enhanced performance is verified in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery.

The vibration or acoustic signal from rotating machinery with localized fault usually behaves as the form of amplitude modulation (AM) and/or frequency modulation (FM). The demodulation techniques are conventional ways to reveal the fault characteristics from the analyzed signals. One of these techniques is the time-scale manifold (TSM) ridge demodulation method with the merits of good time–frequency localization and in-band noise suppression properties. However, due to the essential attribute of wavelet ridge, the survived in-band noise on the achieved TSM will still disturb the envelope extraction of fault-induced impulses. This paper presents an improved TSM ridge demodulation method, called exchanged ridge demodulation of TSM, by combining the benefits of the first two TSMs: the noise suppression of the first TSM and the noise separation of the second TSM. Specifically, the ridge on the second TSM can capture the fault-induced impulses precisely while avoiding the in-band noise smartly. By putting this ridge on the first TSM, the corresponding instantaneous amplitude (IA) waveform can represent the real envelope of pure faulty impulses. Moreover, an adaptive selection method for Morlet wavelet parameters is also proposed based on the smoothness index (SI) in the time-scale domain for an optimal time-scale representation of analyzed signal. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by means of a simulation study and applications to diagnosis of bearing defects and gear fault.