An ensemble local means decomposition method and its application to local rub-impact fault diagnosis of the rotor systems

Targeting the shock characteristics of the vibration signal of a rotor system with local rub-impact fault, a local rub-impact fault diagnosis method of rotor system based on ELMD (ensemble local means decomposition) is proposed in this paper. The local mean decomposition (LMD) is a newly self-adaptive time–frequency analysis method, by which any complicated multi-component signal could be decomposed into a set of product functions (PFs) whose instantaneous frequencies in theory have physical significance. Unfortunately, mode mixing phenomenon which makes the decomposition results devoid of physical meaning is common when LMD is performed in practice. Targeting this shortcoming, the filter bank structure of white noise by LMD is obtained by numerical experiments, and then an improved method based upon noise-assisted analysis, ensemble local mean decomposition, is put forward. In ELMD, firstly, different white noise is added to the targeted signal; secondly, LMD is used to decompose the noise-added signal into product functions (PFs); finally, the ensemble means of corresponding PF components derived from LMD is regarded as the final decomposition result. The analytical results from simulation signal and experimental rotor local rub-impact signal demonstrate that the ELMD approach can be used to overcome the mode mixing of the original LMD method effectively.