When used for separating multi-component non-stationary signals, the adaptive time-varying filter(ATF) based on multi-scale chirplet sparse signal decomposition(MCSSD) generates phase shift and signal distortion. To overcome this drawback, the zero phase filter is introduced to the mentioned filter, and a fault diagnosis method for speed-changing gearbox is proposed. Firstly, the gear meshing frequency of each gearbox is estimated by chirplet path pursuit. Then, according to the estimated gear meshing frequencies, an adaptive zero phase time-varying filter(AZPTF) is designed to filter the original signal. Finally, the basis for fault diagnosis is acquired by the envelope order analysis to the filtered signal. The signal consisting of two time-varying amplitude modulation and frequency modulation(AM-FM) signals is respectively analyzed by ATF and AZPTF based on MCSSD. The simulation results show the variances between the original signals and the filtered signals yielded by AZPTF based on MCSSD are 13.67 and 41.14, which are far less than variances (323.45 and 482.86) between the original signals and the filtered signals obtained by ATF based on MCSSD. The experiment results on the vibration signals of gearboxes indicate that the vibration signals of the two speed-changing gearboxes installed on one foundation bed can be separated by AZPTF effectively. Based on the demodulation information of the vibration signal of each gearbox, the fault diagnosis can be implemented. Both simulation and experiment examples prove that the proposed filter can extract a mono-component time-varying AM-FM signal from the multi-component time-varying AM-FM signal without distortion.
