Teager energy operator for multi-modulation extraction and its application for gearbox fault detection

This paper presents a parameter-free and broadband approach to detecting gear faults based on vibration signals. The technique is implemented using the Teager energy operator (TEO). It is shown that this operator can extract amplitude, phase and frequency modulations that are associated with various gear faults. Spectral analysis of the TEO-transformed signal provides the necessary information for fault detection. To improve the effectiveness of the proposed technique, we also devised a wavelet de-noising step based on online threshold estimation. In the de-noising step, the threshold estimation is performed through a frequency domain median absolute deviation (FMAD) scheme. The proposed fault detection technique is tested on simulated as well as experimental data acquired from a single-stage bevel gearbox and a two-stage parallel gearbox.