Multiscale Symbolic Diversity Entropy: A Novel Measurement Approach for Time-Series Analysis and Its Application in Fault Diagnosis of Planetary Gearboxes

The health condition monitoring of planetary gearboxes has drawn increasing attention due to the importance for safety operation and failure prevention. A novel diagnosis methodology based on multiscale symbolic diversity entropy (SDivEn) is proposed in this article. Herein, dynamical complexity of measured data is quantified by SDivEn. Compare to other entropy-based descriptors, SDivEn has advantages in its robustness and computation efficiency. To increase the feature representation capability of entropy descriptors, multiscale analysis is performed, where the measurement data in time series is decomposed into multiple scaled series by using the coarse graining process and then processed individually by using SDivEn method. The proposed multiscale SDivEn method is applied for fault recognition of planetary gearboxes. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method obtains the highest accuracy in recognizing seven health conditions of planetary gearboxes in comparison with three other existing entropy-based methods.