Extracting effective fault features from the complex vibration signals of planetary gearboxes is the key to conducting efficient fault diagnosis, and it involves signal processing, feature extraction, and feature selection. In this paper, a novel feature extraction method is proposed using variational mode decomposition (VMD), fusion entropy, and random forest (RF). Firstly, VMD is employed to process the nonlinear and non-stationary signals of planetary gearboxes, which can effectively address the issues of signal modulation and mode mixing. Additionally, a fusion entropy that incorporates various refined composite multi-scale entropies is proposed; it fully utilizes the signal characteristics reflected by various entropies as features for fault diagnosis. Then, RF is adopted to calculate the importance of each feature, and appropriate features are selected to form a fault diagnosis vector, aiming to solve the problems of feature redundancy and interference in fusion entropy. Finally, long short-term memory (LSTM) is used for fault classification. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed fusion entropy achieves higher accuracy compared with a single entropy value. The RF-based feature selection can also reduce interference and improve diagnostic efficiency. The proposed fault diagnosis method exhibits high fault diagnosis accuracy under different rotational speeds and environmental noise conditions.

Effective fault feature extraction and classification methods serve as the foundation for achieving the efficient fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes. Considering the vibration signals of planetary gearboxes that contain both symmetrical and asymmetrical components, this paper proposes a novel feature extraction method integrating an adaptive multi-bandpass filter (AMBPF) and refined composite multi-scale fuzzy entropy (RCMFE). And a dream optimization algorithm (DOA)–least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) is also proposed for fault classification. Firstly, the AMBPF is proposed, which can effectively and adaptively separate the meshing frequencies, harmonic frequencies, and their sideband frequency information of the planetary gearbox, and is combined with RCMFE for fault feature extraction. Secondly, the DOA is employed to optimize the parameters of the LSSVM, aiming to enhance its classification efficiency. Finally, the fault diagnosis of the planetary gearbox is achieved by the AMBPF, RCMFE, and DOA-LSSVM. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significantly higher diagnostic efficiency and exhibits superior noise immunity in planetary gearbox fault diagnosis.

To address the limited performance of transfer fault diagnosis for planetary gearboxes under cross-operating conditions, which is caused by the heterogeneous feature distribution of vibration data and insufficient feature extraction. An improved domain-adversarial neural network (IDANN) model based on a joint-adaptive-domain alignment component and a dual-branch feature extractor is proposed. Firstly, a joint domain adaptation alignment approach, integrating maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and CORrelation ALignment (CORAL), is proposed to realize the correlation structure matching of features between the source and target domains of IDANN. Secondly, a dual-branch feature extractor composed of ResNet18 and Swin Transformer is proposed with an attention-weighted fusion mechanism to enhance feature extraction. Finally, validation experiments conducted on public planetary gearbox fault datasets show that the proposed method attains high accuracy and stable performance in cross-operating-condition transfer fault diagnosis.