Application of an Improved Ensemble Local Mean Decomposition Method for Gearbox Composite Fault Diagnosis

In industrial production, it is highly essential to extract faults in gearbox accurately. Specifically, in a strong noise environment, it is difficult to extract the fault features accurately. LMD (local mean decomposition) is widely used as an adaptive decomposition method in fault diagnosis. In order to improve the mode mixing of LMD, ELMD (ensemble Local Mean Decomposition) is proposed as local mode mixing exists in noisy environment, but white noise added in ELMD cannot be completely neutralized leading to the influence of increased white noise on PF (product function) component. This further leads to the increase in reconstruction errors. Therefore, this paper proposes a composite fault diagnosis method for gearboxes based on an improved ensemble local mean decomposition. The idea is to add white noise in pairs to optimize ELMD, defined as CELMD (Complementary Ensemble Local Mean Decomposition) then remove the decomposed high noise component by PE (Permutation Entropy) while applying the SG (Savitzky-Golay) filter to smooth out the low noise in PFs. The method is applied to both simulated signal and experimental signal, which overcomes mode mixing phenomenon and reduces reconstruction error. At the same time, this method avoids the occurrence of pseudocomponents and reduces the amount of calculation. Compared with LMD, ELMD, CELMD, and CELMDAN, it shows that improved ensemble local mean decomposition method is an effective method for extracting composite fault features.