This paper proposes a study on gearbox fault feature extraction of wind turbine under variable speed condition using improved adaptive variational mode decomposition (VMD). Frequent changes in wind speed and critical noise interference make the vibration signal exhibit non-stationary characteristics. Although computational order tracking can transform non-stationary signals in the time domain into stationary angular signals, and then extract fault features from order spectrum obtained by FFT, the obtained order spectrum is liable to be polluted by noise or to appear order aliasing. To avoid order aliasing and eliminate noise interference, the original non-stationary signal is firstly processed using the improved adaptive VMD method called adaptive differential evolution – VMD (ADE-VMD). ADE-VMD can not only utilise the advantages of traditional VMD but also adaptively select narrow-band intrinsic mode function (NBIMF) to construct the reconstructed signal with less noise and without order aliasing. In the experiment, we compared the ADE-VMD method with other VMD methods such as GA-VMD, PSO-VMD and DE-VMD, and the results showed that ADE-VMD has excellent adaptive processing ability, and its convergence and optimisation speed are more remarkable. ADE-VMD can effectively filter the noise inference and avoid the order aliasing, so it is well suitable for fault feature extraction under variable speed.

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