Study on planetary gear fault diagnosis based on entropy feature fusion of ensemble empirical mode decomposition

•A fault diagnosis method of planetary gear is proposed.•The IMFs with small modal aliasing are obtained by EEMD.•The original feature includes the entropy features extracted from multiple angles.•The feature dimension reduction are performed by KPCA.•The status recognition of planetary gear is achieved by LVQ neural network.

Because planetary gear is characterized by its small size, light weight and large transmission ratio, it is widely used in large-scale, low-speed and heavy-duty mechanical systems. Therefore, the fault diagnosis of planetary gear is a key to ensure the safe and reliable operation of such mechanical equipment. A fault diagnosis method of planetary gear based on the entropy feature fusion of ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is proposed. The intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with small modal aliasing are obtained by EEMD, and the original feature set is composed of various entropy features of each IMF. To address the insensitive features in the original feature set and the excessive feature dimension, kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is used to process the original feature set. Kernel principal component extraction and feature dimension reduction are performed. The fault diagnosis of planetary gear is eventually realized by applying the extracted kernel principal components and learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural network. The experiments under different operation conditions are carried out, and the experimental results indicate that the proposed method is capable of extracting the sensitive features and recognizing the fault statuses. The overall recognition rate reaches to 96% when the motor output frequency is 45 Hz and the load is 13.5 N m, and the fault recognition rates of the normal gear, the gear with one missing tooth and the broken gear can reach to 100%. The recognition rates of different fault gears under other operation conditions also can achieve better results. Thus, the proposed method is effective for the diagnosis of planetary gear faults.