A New Approach for Detection of Gear Defects using a Discrete Wavelet Transform and Fast Empirical Mode Decomposition

During the past decades, detection of gear defects remains as a major problem, especially when the gears are subject to non-stationary phenomena. The idea of this paper is to mixture a multilevel wavelet transform with a fast EMD decomposition in order to early detect gear defects. The sensitivity of a kurtosis is used as an indicator of gears defect burn. When the gear is damaged, the appearance of a crack on the gear tooth disrupts the signal. This is due to the presence of periodic pulses. Nevertheless, the existence of background noise induced by the random excitation can have an impact on the values of these temporal indicators. The denoising of these signals by multilevel wavelet transform improves the sensitivity of these indicators and increases the reliability of the investigation. Finally, a defect diagnosis result can be obtained after the fast transformation of the EMD. The proposed approach consists in applying a multi-resolution wavelet analysis with variable decomposition levels related to the severity of gear faults, then a fast EMD is used to early detect faults. The proposed mixed methods are evaluated on vibratory signals from the test bench, CETIM. The obtained results have shown the occurrence of a teeth defect on gear on the 5th and 8th day. This result agrees with the report of the appraisal made on this gear system.