A vibration analysis method based on hybrid techniques and its application to rotating machinery

Vibration-based condition monitoring and fault diagnosis technique is a most effective approach to maintain the safe and reliable operation of rotating machinery. Unfortunately, the vibration signal always exhibits non-linear and non-stationary characteristics, which makes vibration signal analysis and fault feature extraction very difficult. To extract the significant fault features, a vibration analysis method based on hybrid techniques is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the raw signals are decomposed into a few product functions (PFs) using local mean decomposition (LMD), and meanwhile instantaneous frequency and instantaneous amplitude also are obtained. Subsequently, Fourier transform is performed on the derived PFs, and then, according to the spectra features, the useful PFs are selected to reconstruct the purified vibration signals. Lastly, several different fault features are fused to illustrate the operating state of the machinery. The experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately extract machine fault features, which proves that the combined application of LMD and other signal processing techniques is a successful scheme for the machine vibration analysis. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.