Anti-aliasing lifting scheme for mechanical vibration fault feature extraction

A troublesome problem in application of wavelet transform for mechanical vibration fault feature extraction is frequency aliasing. In this paper, an anti-aliasing lifting scheme is proposed to solve this problem. With this method, the input signal is firstly transformed by a redundant lifting scheme to avoid the aliasing caused by split and merge operations. Then the resultant coefficients and their single subband reconstructed signals are further processed to remove the aliasing caused by the unideal frequency property of lifting filters based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) technique. Because the aliasing in each subband signal is eliminated, the ratio of signal to noise (SNR) is improved. The anti-aliasing lifting scheme is applied to analyze a practical vibration signal measured from a faulty ball bearing and testing results confirm that the proposed method is effective for extracting weak fault feature from a complex background. The proposed method is also applied to the fault diagnosis of valve trains in different working conditions on a gasoline engine. The experimental results show that using the features extracted from the anti-aliasing lifting scheme for classification can obtain a higher accuracy than using those extracted from the lifting scheme and the redundant lifting scheme. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.