An Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition Approach to Wear Particle Detection in Lubricating Oil Subject to Particle Overlap

Abstract

With the development of mechanical fault diagnosis technology, complex mechanical systems do not need to be shut down periodically for the maintenance. The working condition of the mechanical systems can be monitored by analyzing the wear metal particles in the systems' lubricating oil. However, the output signals of the monitoring sensor are non-stationary. In some case the particle signals are overlapped with each other.

The goal of this thesis is to find a method to decompose those overlapped particle signals, and then count the particle number in the lubricating oil. At the beginning EMD method was introduced in the experiment because of the character of the sensor signals. In this project, because EMD method is sensitive to the noise in the original signals, an improved version of EMD, EEMD method was implemented. Finally, a post processing method was used to get a better result.