Incipient Gear Fault Detection Using Adaptive Impulsive Wavelet Filter Based on Spectral Negentropy

Abstract Adaptive wavelet filtering is a very important fault feature extraction method in the domain of condition monitoring; however, owing to the time-consuming computation and difficulty of choosing criteria used to represent incipient faults, the engineering applications are limited to some extent. To detect incipient gear faults at a fast speed, a new criterion is proposed to optimize the parameters of the modified impulsive wavelet for constructing an optimal wavelet filter to detect impulsive gear faults. First, a new criterion based on spectral negentropy is proposed. Then, a novel search strategy is applied to optimize the parameters of the impulsive wavelet based on the new criterion. Finally, envelope spectral analysis is applied to determine the incipient fault characteristic frequency. Both the simulation and experimental validation demonstrated the superiority of the proposed approach.