Gear Crack Level Classification Based on EMD and EDT

Gears are the most essential parts in rotating machinery. Crack fault is one of damage modes most frequently occurring in gears. So, this paper deals with the problem of different crack levels classification. The proposed method is mainly based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Euclidean distance technique (EDT). First, vibration signal acquired by accelerometer is processed by EMD and intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) are obtained. Then, a correlation coefficient based method is proposed to select the sensitive IMFs which contain main gear fault information. And energy of these IMFs is chosen as the fault feature by comparing with kurtosis and skewness. Finally, Euclidean distances between test sample and four classes trained samples are calculated, and on this basis, fault level classification of the test sample can be made. The proposed approach is tested and validated through a gearbox experiment, in which four crack levels and three kinds of loads are utilized. The results show that the proposed method has high accuracy rates in classifying different crack levels and may be adaptive to different conditions.