A Time-Frequency Analysis Approach Based on Plane Partition for Fault Diagnosis of the Planetary Gearbox Under Nonstationary Conditions

The planetary gearbox is one of the key components in the rotating machinery. The planetary gearbox is prone to malfunction, which increases downtime and repair costs. Hence, the fault diagnosis of the planetary gearbox is an important research topic. The acquired signal from the planetary gearbox exhibit strongly time-variant and nonstationary features since the planetary gearbox usually works at time-varying speeds. In this study, a new time-frequency analysis method is proposed. This method takes the spectrum shape into account and partitions the time-frequency into several components. Then the fault feature of the planetary gearbox is detected by analyzing the decomposed components. The simulated signal and the experimental signals under nonstationary conditions are analyzed to verify the effectiveness the proposed method. Results show that the proposed method can efficiently extract the fault feature of the planet gear.