Abstract
The evolutionary periodogram has been introduced to mechanical fault diagnosis and relationship between the evolutionary periodogram and time-frequency spectrogram has been investigated. The evolutionary periodogram is unveiled as an especially windowed spectrogram, and is applied to gearbox fault diagnosis. It has been shown that the window used in the evolutionary periodogram is not a single function but a combination of a set of functions. Two cases of gearbox diagnosis are presented as examples of application. Vibration signals and a synchronous signal are collected for the analysis. The time synchronous averaging is used to reduce background noise or random transients to enhance the periodicity of a specific gear rotation. The performance of the evolutionary periodogram has been compared with the spectrogram for gear diagnosis, showing that the evolutionary periodogram is an alternative technique in time-frequency analysis for fault detection and better resolution can be obtained as more choices are offered by the way of constructing the window.