A Novel Parameter-Adaptive VMD Method Based on Grey Wolf Optimization with Minimum Average Mutual Information for Incipient Fault Detection

Abstract

Recently, variational mode decomposition (VMD) has attracted wide attention on mechanical vibration signal analysis. However, there are still some dilemmas in the application of VMD, such as the determination of the number of mode decomposition K and quadratic penalty term α. In order to acquire appropriate parameters of VMD, an improved parameter-adaptive VMD method based on grey wolf optimizer (GWO) is developed by taking the minimum average mutual information into consideration (GWOMI). Firstly, the parameters (K, α) are adaptively determined through GWOMI. Then, the vibration signal is decomposed by the developed method and effective modes are extracted according to the maximum kurtosis. Finally, the extracted modes are processed by Hilbert envelope analysis to acquire the incipient fault features. With the simulation and experimental analysis, it is clearly found that the developed method is effective and performs better than some existing ones.