An improvement EMD method based on the optimized rational Hermite interpolation approach and its application to gear fault diagnosis

•O-EMD can avoid the drawbacks existing in traditional EMD.•GA is applied to automatically select the best shape controlling parameter.•Experimental analysis proved the feasibility and effectivity of the proposed method.

A demodulation technique based on improvement empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is investigated in this paper. Firstly, the problem of the envelope line in EMD is introduced and the drawbacks of two classic interpolation methods, cubic spline interpolation method and cubic Hermite interpolation method are discussed; then a new envelope interpolation method called optimized rational Hermite interpolation method (O-EMD) is proposed, which has a shape controlling parameter compared with the cubic Hermite interpolation algorithm. At the same time, in order to improve the envelope approximation accuracy of local mean, the parameter determining criterion is put forward and an optimization with Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied to automatic select the suitable shape controlling parameter in each sifting process. The effectiveness of O-EMD method is validated by the numerical simulations and an application to gear fault diagnosis. Results demonstrate that O-EMD method can improve the reliability and accuracy significantly compared with traditional EMD method.

Graphical abstractThis paper proposes a new approach called optimized rational Hermite-based EMD (O-EMD), whereby optimized rational Hermite interpolation replaces cubic spline interpolation in the envelope-fitting procedure, it can improve the reliability and accuracy significantly compared with traditional EMD method. The following figure is the envelope-lines of the optimized Hermite interpolation (yellow line) and cubic spline interpolation (green dashed line), from which we can find that O-EMD method has better envelope-lines than traditional EMD method.Figure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide