Review of local mean decomposition and its application in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Rotating machinery is widely used in the industry. They are vulnerable to many kinds of damages especially for those working under tough and time-varying operation conditions. Early detection of these damages is important, otherwise, they may lead to large economic loss even a catastrophe. Many signal processing methods have been developed for fault diagnosis of the rotating machinery. Local mean decomposition (LMD) is an adaptive mode decomposition method that can decompose a complicated signal into a series of mono-components, namely product functions (PFs). In recent years, many researchers have adopted LMD in fault detection and diagnosis of rotating machines. We give a comprehensive review of LMD in fault detection and diagnosis of rotating machines. First, the LMD is described. The advantages, disadvantages and some improved LMD methods are presented. Then, a comprehensive review on applications of LMD in fault diagnosis of the rotating machinery is given. The review is divided into four parts: fault diagnosis of gears, fault diagnosis of rotors, fault diagnosis of bearings, and other LMD applications. In each of these four parts, a review is given to applications applying the LMD, improved LMD, and LMD-based combination methods, respectively. We give a summary of this review and some future potential topics at the end.