Online condition diagnosis for a two-stage gearbox machinery of an aerospace utilization system using an ensemble multi-fault features indexing approach

China manned space station is designed to operate for over ten years. Long-term and sustainable research on space science and technology will be conducted during its operation. The application payloads must meet the "long life and high reliability" mission requirement. Gearbox machinery is one of the essential devices in an aerospace utilization system, failure of which may lead to downtime loss even during some disastrous catastrophes. A fault diagnosis of gearbox has attracted attentions for its significance in preventing catastrophic accidents and guaranteeing sufficient maintenance. A novel fault diagnosis method based on the Ensemble Multi-Fault Features Indexing (EMFFI) approach is proposed for the condition monitoring of gearboxes. Different from traditional methods of signal analysis in the one-dimensional space, this study employs a supervised learning method to determine the faults of a gearbox in a two-dimensional space using the classification model established by training the features extracted automatically from diagnostic vibration signals captured. The proposed method mainly includes the following steps. First, the vibration signals are transformed into a bi-spectrum contour map utilizing bi-spectrum technology, which provides a basis for the following image-based feature extraction. Then, Speeded-Up Robustness Feature (SURF) is applied to automatically extract the image feature points of the bi-spectrum contour map using a multi-fault features indexing theory, and the feature dimension is reduced by Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Finally, Random Forest (RF) is introduced to identify the fault types of the gearbox. The test results verify that the proposed method based on the multi-fault features indexing approach achieves the target of high diagnostic accuracy and can serve as a highly effective technique to discover faults in a gearbox machinery such as a two-stage one. (C) 2019 Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics.