Application of local mean decomposition in gear fault diagnosis

As a new kind of self-adaptation time-frequency analysis approach, local mean decomposition (LMD) is beginning to be applied in the field of fault diagnosis. The simulation signals were used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in processing multi-components modulated signals which express the characteristics of gear fault signals. Then, the LMD method was introduced to diagnose gear faults including wear, fracture and spalling by extracting the fault features from the test signals. The analysis results demonstrate that LMD can diagnose gear faults and improve the accuracy of diagnosis, compared with the traditional demodulation approach.