The analysis of wheel-rail vibration signal based on frequency slice wavelet transform

In order to extract the features of wheel-rail vibration, a novel fault diagnosis approach using time-frequency slice analysis is proposed. Firstly, wheel-rail vibration signal was transformed by frequency sliced wavelet transform (FSWT) to get the time-frequency characteristic figures of wheel-rail impact. Secondly, the time-frequency region was selected on the basis of the characteristic of the signal energy distribution. Thirdly, the chosen time-frequency region is further refining analyzed to highlight the hidden time-frequency characteristics. Finally, the time-frequency region which contains fault feature is separated. Through inverse FSWT transformation, the signal component was reconstructed to separate the time-frequency characteristics of effective signals. The effectiveness of this approach has been proved through the dynamics simulation data, gives a new and efficient method to extracting the features of wheel-rail vibration.