Application of Sample Entropy Based LMD-TFPF De-Noising Algorithm for the Gear Transmission System

This paper investigates an improved noise reduction method and its application on gearbox vibration signal de-noising. A hybrid de-noising algorithm based on local mean decomposition (LMD), sample entropy (SE), and time-frequency peak filtering (TFPF) is proposed. TFPF is a classical filter method in the time-frequency domain. However, there is a contradiction in TFPF, i.e., a good preservation for signal amplitude, but poor random noise reduction results might be obtained by selecting a short window length, whereas a serious attenuation for signal amplitude, but effective random noise reduction might be obtained by selecting a long window length. In order to make a good tradeoff between valid signal amplitude preservation and random noise reduction, LMD and SE are adopted to improve TFPF. Firstly, the original signal is decomposed into PFs by LMD, and the SE value of each product function (PF) is calculated in order to classify the numerous PFs into the useful component, mixed component, and the noise component; then short-window TFPF is employed for the useful component, long-window TFPF is employed for the mixed component, and the noise component is removed; finally, the final signal is obtained after reconstruction. The gearbox vibration signals are employed to verify the proposed algorithm, and the comparison results show that the proposed SE-LMD-TFPF has the best de-noising results compared to traditional wavelet and TFPF method.