Copula-Based Time-Frequency Distribution Analysis for Planetary Gearbox Fault Detection

Linear and bilinear time-frequency distributions (TFDs) have been employed in planetary gearbox fault diagnosis. For linear TFDs, there is a trade-off between the time localization and frequency resolution and the spectrogram may not have correct energy marginals. For bilinear TFDs, they cannot be interpreted as an energy distribution because of the existence of possible negative values even though they are designed for energy density representation. To overcome these shortcomings, TFDs based on copula theory have been reported in the literature. In this paper, we analyze two simulated data sets using linear TFD and copula-based TFD. The results show that the constructed copula-based TFD has desirable properties of being positive, free from cross-term interference, having high time-frequency resolution and matching well with true marginals. The copula-based TFD is also able to locate fault-induced impulses by vertical lines over a certain frequency range in the time-frequency domain. Consequently, this study confirms the advantages of the copula-based TFD as an energy distribution and its capability in fault detection for planetary gearboxes.