Cavitation Diagnostics Based on Self-Tuning VMD for Fluid Machinery with Low-SNR Conditions

Abstract Variational mode decomposition (VMD) is a suitable tool for processing cavitation-induced vibration signals and is greatly affected by two parameters: the decomposed number K and penalty factor α under strong noise interference. To solve this issue, this study proposed self-tuning VMD (SVMD) for cavitation diagnostics in fluid machinery, with a special focus on low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. A two-stage progressive refinement of the coarsely located target penalty factor for SVMD was conducted to narrow down the search space for accelerated decomposition. A hybrid optimized sparrow search algorithm (HOSSA) was developed for optimal α fine-tuning in a refined space based on fault-type-guided objective functions. Based on the submodes obtained using exclusive penalty factors in each iteration, the cavitation-related characteristic frequencies (CCFs) were extracted for diagnostics. The power spectrum correlation coefficient between the SVMD reconstruction and original signals was employed as a stop criterion to determine whether to stop further decomposition. The proposed SVMD overcomes the blindness of setting the mode number K in advance and the drawback of sharing penalty factors for all submodes in fixed-parameter and parameter-optimized VMDs. Comparisons with other existing methods in simulation signal decomposition and in-lab experimental data demonstrated the advantages of the proposed method in accurately extracting CCFs with lower computational cost. SVMD especially enhances the denoising capability of the VMD-based method.