Abstract

Fault diagnosis and failure prognosis are essential techniques in improving the safety of many mechanical systems. However, vibration signals are often corrupted by noise; therefore, the performance of diagnostic and prognostic algorithms is degraded. In this paper, a novel denoising structure is proposed and applied to vibration signals collected from a testbed of the helicopter main gearbox subjected to a seeded fault. The proposed structure integrates a denoising algorithm, feature extraction, failure prognosis, and vibration modeling into a synergistic system. Performance indexes associated with the quality of the extracted features and failure prognosis are addressed, before and after denoising, for validation purposes. © 2009 IEEE.