Fault degradation assessment of water hydraulic motor by impulse vibration signal with Wavelet Packet Analysis and Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test

The machinery fault diagnosis is important for improving reliability and performance of systems. Many methods such as Time Synchronous Average (TSA), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based spectrum analysis and short-time Fourier transform (STFT) have been applied in fault diagnosis and condition monitoring of mechanical system. The above methods analyze the signal in frequency domain with low resolution, which is not suitable for non-stationary vibration signal. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test is a simple and precise technique in vibration signal analysis for machinery fault diagnosis. It has limited use and advantage to analyze the vibration signal with higher noise directly. In this paper, a new method for the fault degradation assessment of the water hydraulic motor is proposed based on Wavelet Packet Analysis (WPA) and KS test to analyze the impulsive energy of the vibration signal, which is used to detect the piston condition of water hydraulic motor. WPA is used to analyze the impulsive vibration signal from the casing of the water hydraulic motor to obtain the impulsive energy. The impulsive energy of the vibration signal can be obtained by the multi-decomposition based on Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) and used as feature values to assess the fault degradation of the pistons. The kurtosis of the impulsive energy in the reconstructed signal from the Wavelet Packet coefficients is used to extract the feature values of the impulse energy by calculating the coefficients of the WPT multi-decomposition. The KS test is used to compare the kurtosis of the impulse energy of the vibration signal statistically under the different piston conditions. The results show the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method to assess the fault degradation of the pistons in the water hydraulic motor. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.