An improved local mean decomposition method and its application for fault diagnosis of reciprocating compressor

Local mean decomposition (LMD) is a new time-frequency analysis method which can decompose a signal adaptively into a set of product function (PF) components, and the construction of local mean function and envelope function plays an important role in the accuracy of its PF components. Aiming at the strong nonstationarity, nonlinearity and multi-component coupling characteristics of reciprocating compressor vibration signals, an improved LMD was proposed by a novel construction method of local mean function and envelope function. By introducing an extreme symmetrical point between two extreme points and using the Monotone Piecewise Cubic Hermite Interpolation (MPCHI) instead of Cubic Spline Interpolation (CSI) to construct the envelopes, a novel construction method of local mean function and envelope function was proposed, and then the improved LMD algorithm was given based on this novel construction method. The improved LMD was applied to decompose the vibration signals of reciprocating compressor fault states, and the comparison of details between different LMD decomposition results verified the superiority of this improved method. The envelope frequency spectrum of PF component gives a more significant peak of fault frequency than that of original signal, which further indicates that this proposed method is competent for the diagnosis of reciprocating compressor oversized bearing clearance fault.