To address the issues of high concealment and difficult positioning of loose bolts in transmission towers, this paper proposes a new method for locating loose bolts in transmission towers. In this method, we divide the vibration response of the transmission tower into low-frequency signals of 2–25 Hz and high-frequency signals of 25–75 Hz. For the low-frequency signals, the single signal component is obtained by adaptive Chirp mode decomposition and uses the general demodulation transformation to deeply denoise the non-modal information. Since frequency characteristics themselves do not contain time information, considering the importance of time information for positioning, we propose a low-frequency time-varying frequency feature that preserves time characteristics based on synchronous wavelet transform and peak search. For the high-frequency signals, we use singular value decomposition to remove signal outliers caused by pulse excitation and eliminate forced vibrations through wavelet packet transform. Without altering its inherent characteristics, this method enables high-frequency time-domain signals to better represent the nonlinear characteristics of transmission towers. Furthermore, based on the powerful capabilities of Timesnet and Transformer in dealing with time series data, we propose a fault diagnosis model, which ultimately achieves the positioning of loose bolts in transmission towers. The bolt node model proves that this approach can better represent the loose bolt characteristics, and the transmission tower model verifies the effectiveness of this approach in locating loose bolts in transmission towers. Finally, bolt-loosening tests were conducted on a 110 kV transmission tower, and the accuracy of the positioning results reached 92.8%, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of this method in practical positioning applications.
