Variational mode decomposition: Mode determination method for rotating machinery diagnosis

Abstract

Variational mode decomposition (VMD) is a modern decomposition method used for many engineering monitoring and diagnosis recently, which replaced traditional empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method. However, the performance of VMD method specifically depends on the parameter that need to pre-determine for VMD method especially the mode number. This paper proposed a mode determination method using signal difference average (SDA) to determine the mode number for the VMD method by taking the advantages of similarities concept between sum of variational mode functions (VMFs) and the input signals. Online high-speed gear and bearing fault data were used to validate the performance of the proposed method. The diagnosis result using frequency spectrum has been compared with traditional EMD method and the proposed method has been proved to be able to provide an accurate number of mode for the VMD method effectively for rotating machinery applications.