Application of mother wavelet functions for automatic gear and bearing fault diagnosis

This paper introduces an automatic feature extraction system for gear and bearing fault diagnosis using wavelet-based signal processing. Vibration signals recorded from two experimental set-ups were processed for gears and bearing conditions. Four statistical features were selected: standard deviation, variance, kurtosis, and fourth central moment of continuous wavelet coefficients of synchronized vibration signals (CWC-SVS). In this research, the mother wavelet selection is broadly discussed. 324 mother wavelet candidates were studied, and results show that Daubechies 44 (db44) has the most similar shape across both gear and bearing vibration signals. Next, an automatic feature extraction algorithm is introduced for gear and bearing defects. It also shows that the fourth central moment of CWC-SVS is a proper feature for both bearing and gear failure diagnosis. Standard deviation and variance of CWC-SVS demonstrated more appropriate outcome for bearings than gears. Kurtosis of CWC-SVS illustrated the acceptable performance for gears only. Results also show that although db44 is the most similar mother wavelet function across the vibration signals, it is not the proper function for all wavelet-based processing. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.