Customized lifting multiwavelet packet information entropy for equipment condition identification

Condition identification of mechanical equipment from vibration measurement data is significant to avoid economic loss caused by unscheduled breakdowns and catastrophic accidents. However, this task still faces challenges due to the complexity of equipment and the harsh environment. This paper provides a possibility for equipment condition identification by proposing a method called customized lifting multiwavelet packet information entropy. Benefiting from the properties of multi-resolution analysis and multiple wavelet basis functions, the multiwavelet method has advantages in characterizing non-stationary vibration signals. In order to realize the accurate detection and identification of the condition features, a customized lifting multiwavelet packet is constructed via a multiwavelet lifting scheme. Then the vibration signal from the mechanical equipment is processed by the customized lifting multiwavelet packet transform. The relative energy in each frequency band of the multiwavelet packet transform coefficients that equals a percentage of the whole signal energy is taken as the probability. The normalized information entropy is obtained based on the relative energy to describe the condition of a mechanical system. The proposed method is applied to the condition identification of a rolling mill and a demountable disk–drum aero-engine. The results support the feasibility of the proposed method in equipment condition identification. (paper)