The performance of a gearbox is sensitive to failures, especially in the long-term high speed and heavy load field. However, the multi-fault diagnosis in gearboxes is a challenging problem because of the complex and non-stationary measured signal. To obtain fault information more fully and improve the accuracy of gearbox fault diagnosis, this paper proposes a feature extraction method, hierarchical refined composite multiscale fluctuation dispersion entropy (HRCMFDE) to extract the fault features of rolling bearing and the gear vibration signals at different layers and scales. On this basis, a novel fault diagnosis scheme for the gearbox based on HRCMFDE, ReliefF and grey wolf optimizer regularized extreme learning machine is proposed. Firstly, HRCMFDE is employed to extract the original features, the multi-frequency time information can be evaluated simultaneously, and the fault feature information can be extracted more fully. After that, ReliefF is used to screen the sensitive features from the high-dimensional fault features. Finally, the sensitive features are inputted into the optimized regularized extreme learning machine to identify the fault states of the gearbox. Through three different types of gearbox experiments, the experimental results confirm that the proposed method has better diagnostic performance and generalization, which can effectively and accurately identify the different fault categories of the gearbox and outperforms other contrastive methods.

The fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is vital in industry but traditionally depends on manual expertise, requiring substantial resources. To improve diagnostic accuracy, enable effective condition monitoring, and minimize the impact of faults on operations, advanced diagnostic techniques are essential. Hence, we propose an advanced fault diagnosis framework that leverages improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO), variational mode decomposition (VMD), and probabilistic neural networks (PNN) to accurately diagnose faults in rotating machinery using gear and rolling bearing vibration signals. Initially, the vibration signals are decomposed into intrinsic mode functions via VMD, enabling the capture of subtle but critical fault features. To address parameter selection challenges in VMD, we employed IPSO to optimize the VMD parameters, ensuring the optimal decomposition effect. Further, we refined the feature set by applying Laplace fraction optimization and feature dimensionality reduction, isolating sensitive features that serve as input to a PNN-based fault classification model. Experimental results demonstrated that this IPSO-VMD-PNN framework achieves high diagnostic accuracy for various fault types, establishing it as an effective tool for fault identification in rotating machinery.