Multivariate intrinsic wave-characteristic decomposition and its application in gear fault diagnosis

In the early stages of gear faults, the background noise in the signal is pronounced, making it challenging to fully assess the health status of equipment based on a single-channel signal. Processing multi-channel signals proves beneficial for extracting fault information comprehensively. Adaptive multivariate signal decomposition methods, such as multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) and multivariate local characteristic-scale decomposition (MLCD), employ a fixed multivariate mean curve extraction method for signal decomposition. Consequently, these methods often exhibit suboptimal performance when decomposing different multi-channel signals. This study defines nine multivariate mean curve extraction methods and introduces the multivariate intrinsic wave-characteristic decomposition (MIWD) method based on the principles of mean curve optimization and an adaptive projection method. MIWD dynamically optimizes the multivariate mean curve during the decomposition process, resulting in superior performance in terms of decomposition accuracy, capability, and orthogonality compared to MEMD and MLCD. Furthermore, we apply MIWD to gear fault diagnosis, and simulation and experimental results affirm the superiority of MIWD.