A Novel Fault Feature Recognition Method for Time-Varying Signals and Its Application to Planetary Gearbox Fault Diagnosis under Variable Speed Conditions

The existing time-frequency analysis (TFA) methods mainly highlight the time-frequency ridges of the interested components by optimizing the time-frequency plane to facilitate the extraction of the relevant components. Generalized demodulation (GD), order tracking (OT), and other methods are generally used in conjunction with the TFA methods to realize the transition from a time-varying signal to a stationary signal, and finally identify the fault feature through a time-frequency plane. Generally, it is necessary to clarify the accuracy of the estimated components such as the rotational frequency or the fault characteristic frequency (FCF) during the operation of the GD or OT methods. Unfortunately, it is not only difficult to extract and locate rotational frequency or FCF, but also complicated in the whole estimation process. In this paper, a simple yet readable method is proposed to reveal the fault feature of time-varying signals. First, the method only needs to extract an arbitrary instantaneous frequency (IF). This is different from the GD method which needs to estimate and locate all phase functions. Then, it converts all variable frequency curves into corresponding lines parallel to the frequency axis based on the extracted IF to determine the proportional relationship between the components. Finally, to further improve the readability of the final results, we reduce the dimension of the transformed time-frequency representation to generate a two-dimensional (2D) energy-frequency map with high resolution and the same proportion. Subsequently, the performance is validated by simulated and experimental data.