DTMSgram: a novel optimal demodulation frequency band selection method for wheelset bearings fault diagnosis under wheel-rail excitation

Abstract Due to the influence of the wheel-rail excitation and complex transmission path, the fault signature of wheelset bearings is often obscured by complex background noise, which brings great challenges to the adaptive determination of the informative frequency band (IFB) in envelope analysis. In this paper, the vibration response characteristics of the axle box under wheel–rail excitation are revealed through full-scale bench tests. The experimental results show that tread damage will provoke periodic transient impacts and it has an obvious sparsity in the frequency domain. Inspired by this feature, a DTMSgram method is proposed to enhance the fault feature components of vibration signals through time-domain and frequency-domain noise reduction technology, and improve the accuracy of demodulation frequency band selection. Firstly, the amplitude spectrum of different weight coefficients is used to preprocess the vibration signal and adjust the full band component of the vibration signal. Then, the autocorrelation process is performed on each layer’s narrowband filtered signal envelope in kurtogram to further reduce noise interference from a time-domain perspective. Moreover, a two-dimensional color map is constructed showing the normalized squared envelope spectrum of the IFBs determined simultaneously from the modified signal. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulated signal and experimental data of three sets of full-size wheelset bearing systems. The analysis results indicate this proposed method can effectively overcome the influence of complex wheel–rail excitation interference and can diagnose multi-source faults simultaneously.