Comparison between Wigner–Ville distribution- and empirical mode decomposition vibration-based techniques for helical gearbox monitoring

This article presents a comparison between empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and smoothed pseudo-Wigner–Ville distribution (SPWVD) methods based on vibration signature and energy calculation procedure for monitoring gearbox systems. The simulation and experimental work were carried out using two-stage helical gears for a healthy pair of gears and a pair suffering from a tooth breakage with severity fault 1 (25 per cent tooth removal), fault 2 (50 per cent tooth removal), fault 3 (75 per cent tooth removal), and fault 4 (100 per cent tooth removal) under loads (0, 20, 40, 60, and 80 per cent of the total load) and speeds (10, 30, 50, 70, and 90 per cent of full speed). This article illustrates that the calculation of energy using EMD techniques offers a more effective way to detect early faults than that computations using the SPWVD method, and that the computation of energy using the EMD technique is faster than the calculations done using the SPWVD method.