Extracting effective fault features from the complex vibration signals of planetary gearboxes is the key to conducting efficient fault diagnosis, and it involves signal processing, feature extraction, and feature selection. In this paper, a novel feature extraction method is proposed using variational mode decomposition (VMD), fusion entropy, and random forest (RF). Firstly, VMD is employed to process the nonlinear and non-stationary signals of planetary gearboxes, which can effectively address the issues of signal modulation and mode mixing. Additionally, a fusion entropy that incorporates various refined composite multi-scale entropies is proposed; it fully utilizes the signal characteristics reflected by various entropies as features for fault diagnosis. Then, RF is adopted to calculate the importance of each feature, and appropriate features are selected to form a fault diagnosis vector, aiming to solve the problems of feature redundancy and interference in fusion entropy. Finally, long short-term memory (LSTM) is used for fault classification. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fusion entropy achieves higher accuracy compared with a single entropy value. The RF-based feature selection can also reduce interference and improve diagnostic efficiency. The proposed fault diagnosis method exhibits high fault diagnosis accuracy under different rotational speeds and environmental noise conditions.
Xia et al. (Sun,) studied this question.