Application of the EEMD method to multiple faults diagnosis of gearbox

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is a powerful tool for the non-stationary and nonlinear signal analysis and has attracted considerable attention recently. However, one of primary problems existing in the EMD is the mode mixing, which makes the physical meaning of decomposition results obscure. The ensemble EMD (EEMD) is presented to alleviate the shortcoming. The EEMD is a noise-added method and can extract the components with truly physical meaning from the signal. Firstly, a simulation signal is used to test the performance of the EEMD; compared with the EMD, the EEMD illustrates the superiority over the EMD. Then, the fault diagnosis method based on the EEMD is applied to diagnose the faults of the gearbox with multiple faults and successfully extracts the multiple faults information from the collected signal. The results show that the fault diagnosis method based on the EEMD is a promising method for the fault diagnosis of gearboxes.