Adaptive redundant multiwavelet denoising with improved neighboring coefficients for gearbox fault detection

Gearbox fault detection under strong background noise is a challenging task. It is feasible to make the fault feature distinct through multiwavelet denoising. In addition to the advantage of multi-resolution analysis, multiwavelet with several scaling functions and wavelet functions can detect the different fault features effectively. However, the fixed basis functions not related to the given signal may lower the accuracy of fault detection. Moreover, the multiwavelet transform may result in Gibbs phenomena in the step of reconstruction. Furthermore, both traditional term-by-term threshold and neighboring coefficients do not consider the direct spatial dependency of wavelet coefficients at adjacent scale. To overcome these deficiencies, adaptive redundant multiwavelet (ARM) denoising with improved neighboring coefficients (NeighCoeff) is proposed. Based on symmetric multiwavelet lifting scheme (SMLS), taking kurtosis—partial envelope spectrum entropy as the evaluation objective and genetic algorithms as the optimization method, ARM is proposed. Considering the intra-scale and inter-scale dependency of wavelet coefficients, the improved NeighCoeff method is developed and incorporated into ARM. The proposed method is applied to both the simulated signal and the practical gearbox vibration signal under different conditions. The results show its effectiveness and reliance for gearbox fault detection.

► A novel method is proposed for the construction of adaptive redundant multiwavelet.
► The improved neighboring coefficients is developed and incorporated into adaptive redundant multiwavelet.
► A new method is proposed for gearbox fault detection.