Application of Wavelet Synchrosqueezing Transform
For Wind Turbine Gearbox Fault Diagnosis
R.Uma Maheswari1,2
1.Research Scholar, Anna University, Chennai
2.Department of ECE, Rajalakshmi Institute of Technology,
Chennai, India
uma.bhuvan@gmail.com
Abstract— In Wind turbine condition monitoring systems , the
vibration signal analysis is used as the effective tool for fault
diagnosis. Gear transmission systems are complex and expensive
among the drive train components. Faults developed in the
gearbox will lead to unscheduled down time of wind turbine.
Vibration signals are non stationary in nature and the usual
spectral analysis tools are not sufficient for the effective fault
diagnosis. In this paper, A novel joint time- frequency Wavelet
synchrosqueezing transform (WSST) is proposed for the effective
intrinsic modes extraction. WSST provides fine Time-Frequency
resolution. To improve the performance of WSST towards noise
sensitivity, Wavelet Denoising with soft thresholding is employed.
The efficacy of the proposed methodology is tested with the
NERL GRC Wind Turbine condition monitoring benchmark
datasets. From the simulation results, it has been shown that the
proposed method extracts the intrinsic mode functions with more
precise time frequency resolution.
Keywords — Synchrosqueezing, Joint Time-Frequency
Representation, Wavelet, Non Stationary.
I. INTRODUCTION
World’s energy deficit inflates. To meet up the increasing
demand for energy, in recent times the alternate energy is
focused that includes the wind energy. Cost of wind energy
proportional to the operation and maintenance cost of the wind
turbine. Wind drive train components failure causes
unscheduled down time which affects the production of wind
energy. Early assessment of components deterioration helps in
prognostic maintenance. Condition monitoring is the major
element in predictive maintenance. The operating parameters
are monitored to indentify the significant changes in the
operating conditions that may lead to the machinery failures.
Vibration analysis is key component in condition based
maintenance. Accelerometer sensors are mounted at different
locations on the drive train to measure the vibration signal.
Vibration signatures reveal the defects at the incipient stages.
Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) are used in earlier days to
analysis the vibration spectrum.FFT algorithms are well suited
for the stationary signal analysis. Since wind turbines are non
linear systems the vibration signals obtained from them are
non stationary. Instantaneous Frequency profile is recovered
from the concentrated TFR. Generalized synchrosqueezing is
978-1-5090-0612-0/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
R.Umamaheswari1
1. Department of EEE,
Velammal Engineering College,
Chennai, India.
umavijay.iitm@gmail.com
employed to facilitate the synchrosqueezing of Time-
Frequency representation [1].Closed spaced instantaneous
frequency profiles leads to the interference .To address this
issue iterative generalized synchrosqueezing transform is
proposed [2].Synchrosqueezed transform with SVM is
proposed as the diagnostic tool for ball bearing faults[3].To
reduce the diffusion of curved Instantaneous frequency(IF)
profile matching Demodulation transform is proposed [4] .In
this paper the wavelet synchrosqueezing transform is applied
to vibration signature to extract the intrinsic mode functions
effectively.
II. PREPOSED METHOD
The vibration signals are preprocessed by using the wavelet
denoising technique. The wavelet synchrosqueezing transform
(WSST) is applied on the denoised signal.
A. Wavelet Denoising
The measurement noise is corrupting the vibration and the
transmission system may pass the vibration to the case of the
machining when it reaches the accelerometer sensor the signal
strength will be very low .To improve the SNR of the signal,
Wavelet denoising technique is employed[5] . The noisy
signal is in the model of
x(n ) = y (n ) + σ w (n ) (1)
Where x(n) is the corrupted signal y(n) is the signal
component , σ is noise power w(n) is the noise. The denoising
suppresses the noise and retrieve the signal part y. The
denoising algorithm based on the inhomogeneous function that
means the energy are concentrated on the small subset of the
space. All wavelet coefficients are equally contaminated by
noise[6].The empirical wavelet coefficient is defined as
w i, j= ω i, j + v i, j (2)
where v is the white noise , ω is the wavelet transform. The
following steps describes the threshold wavelet denoising
process.
• The signal is decomposed to obtain the empirical
wavelet coefficients.
• Threshold level is selected and soft thresholding is
applied on the coefficients. The signal part y(n) is
 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

reconstructed by translating all wavelet coefficients
by an amount 2 log n • σ
n •
• Soft threshold non linearity
ξ t ( z ) = sgn( z )( z − t ) +
B. Wavelet Synchro Squeezing Transform
Wavelet synchrosqueezing transform is the time-frequency
representation that used to extract the intrinsic mode functions
from the multi component AM-FM modulated signal.
Synchrosqueezing transform sharpens the time frequency
representation by reallocating to a different concentrated
point. The mathematical modeling for synchrosqueezing
described in [7] is adapted. For the signal
x(t ) = A cos ωt (4)
where A is the amplitude and ω is the frequency of the
signal. The continuous wavelet transform x to ψ is defined as
Synchrosqueezing algorithm is described by the following
steps.
Continuous wavelet transform (CWT) is applied
on the multi component amplitude modulated and
(3) frequency modulated input signal.
• The instantaneous frequency (IF) profile is extracted
from the CWT output.
• The regions where the phase of instantaneous
frequency are constant are squeezed.
• The IF frequency is reallocated to the centric
position of the time-frequency plane. The intrinsic
mode functions are well separated in the time-
frequency plane.
Figure 1 explains the proposed methodology.
Vibration Signal Acquisition
by using Accelerometer
Sensors

in the equation (5).

A 1/ 2
W x ( k , h) = k ψ (kω )e ihω (5) Preprocessing-Wavelet
4π Denoising (Improves SNR)
candidate instantaneous frequency for the signal x is described
in the equation (6)[8] .
∂
ωx (k, h) = −i(Wx (k, h)−1 Wx (k, h) (6) Instantaneous Frequency
∂h
Extraction by using Continuous
The information from the time scale plane is mapped in to the Wavelet Transform
time –frequency plane. Point (h,k) is mapped into
(h, ω x (k , h) .The synchrosqueezing transform is explained
as in equation (7). Squeezing in Time Frequency
Tx (ωl , h) = (Δω)−1  Wx (ai , h)ai−3 / 2 (Δa)k
Δω
(7) Representation (TFR) Plane.
Constant Phase points
ai : ω(ai , h) −ωl ≤
2 reallocated to some other points
WSST decomposes the signal into the intrinsic mode in TFR
functions(IMF). IMF are simple circular harmonic functions
oscillating around zero .IMF can be defined as [7] Figure 1: Proposed Methodology
I f (t ) = X k (t ) cos(ω k (t )) (8)
where I f (t ) is IMF , X k (t ) is the Amplitude modulated III. EXPERIMENTAL DATA

component and ω k (t ) is the frequency modulated

Vibration data used in this paper, is obtained from NREL
component. Each intrinsic mode function is very slowly Wind Turbine Gearbox Vibration Condition Monitoring
varying sinusoidal harmonic motions. Further the derivative of Benchmarking Datasets. The GRC test Wind turbine is stall
the frequency ω k (t ) is finite. Each IMF should satisfy the
'
controlled, three bladed upwind turbine with rated power
following conditions. 750KW. National instrument PXI-4472B high speed data
acquisition system. Vibration signals are acquired at 40 KHz
1. Where X k (t ) >0 is the continuously differentiable function
per channel. Eight Accelerometer sensors are mounted at
that means dX k (t )
≠ 0 various places in the wind turbine drive train. Those measure
dt the vibration data .The dataset consists of ten one minute data
2. ω k (t ) is a two times continuously differentiable measured at 50 % rated power and 1800 rpm nominal high
function[9]. speed shaft. The corresponding main shaft speed is 22.09 rpm.
The Experimental setup consists of two gear box with overall
 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

gear ratio 1:81.49.The gear boxes consist of one low speed

planetary stage and two parallel stages [10]. Table I:Signal Properties
IV. INTRINSIC MODE FUNCTION EXTRACTION Signal Properties
USING WSST Denoised
Signal Values Raw Vibration
Vibration
Wavelet denoising suppresses the noise level and retrieves the SNR -10.1395 --5.8780
signal information. Figure (2) illustrates the raw vibration
Peak2rms 4.7401 4.6442
signal measured by accelerometer sensor and the denoised
signal is illustrated in Figure (3).Table I describes the Peak2Peak 35.2558 10.3628
properties of the raw vibration and denoised vibration. The
SNR is improved in the wavelet denoising. Figure (4) shows
the Time Frequency plane of the synchrosqueezing signal. The
mode shapes in the AM-FM modulated components are not
clearly visible in the figure(4). Figure (5) illustrates the AM-
FM modulated components in TFR plane. To extract the mode
shapes the contour plot is drawn .These mode shapes can be
reconstructed by using the inverse wavelet synchrosqueezing.
This is the advantage of the proposed method over the other
time frequency reassignment techniques.

Figure 4 : Synchrosqueezing Waveform

Figure 2: Raw Vibration signal

Figure 5: Intrinsic Mode functions in Time –Frequency Plane.

Three highest energy ridges are extracted from the

Figure 3: Denoised Vibration signal
synchrosqueezing wavelets. From Figure 6, it is evident that
the three modes of oscillations are isolated in the three ridges.
These from concentrated ridges IMF are extracted by applying
inverse wavelet synchrosqueezing. The extracted IMF are time
domain information which indicates the fault signatures. From
the simulation results, it is evident that the proposed method
 2016 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research
extracts the IMF in sharper Time-Frequency plane effectively.
The proposed WSST improves the frequency resolution by
keeping fine time resolution.
Figure 6: Highest Energy Ridges
The intrinsic mode functions ( IMF) are reconstructed in time
domain. Figure 7 shows the sensitive intrinsic mode functions
that reveals gear faulty signatures. The spectral analysis of the
isolated IMF revels that the damage in the ring gears.
Figure 7: Reconstructed Intrinsic Mode Functions.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, gear fault diagnostic method based on wavelet
synchrosqueezing transform is presented. The proposed
method decomposes the time varying non stationary vibration
signals with sharpen time and frequency resolution. The
performance and effectiveness of the proposed technique is
evaluated in real time with NERL Wind Turbine Gearbox
Vibration Condition Monitoring Benchmarking Datasets.
From the simulation results it has been observed that the
proposed WSST technique restrain the time frequency smudge
while preserving the good time resolution and fine frequency
resolution. The proposed method is particularly suited to
enhance the readability of the time –frequency representation
thus it increases the effectiveness of the gear box fault
diagnosis under time varying conditions.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We extend our gratitude to NERL for providing the Wind
Turbine Gearbox Vibration Condition Monitoring
Benchmarking Datasets.
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