Fault detection in complex mechanical systems such as wind turbine gearboxes remains challenging, even with the recently significant advancement of sensing and signal processing technologies. As first-principle models of gearboxes capable of reflecting response details for health monitoring purpose are difficult to obtain, data-driven approaches are often adopted for fault detection, identification or classification. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework that combines information from multiple sensors and fundamental physics of the gearbox. Time domain vibration and acoustic emission signals are collected from a gearbox dynamics testbed, where both healthy and faulty gears with different fault conditions are tested. To deal with the nonstationary nature of the wind turbine operation, a harmonic wavelet based method is utilized to extract the time-frequency features in the signals. This new framework features the employment of the tachometer readings and gear meshing relationships to develop a speed profile masking technique. The time-frequency wavelet features are highlighted by applying the mask we construct. Those highlighted features from multiple accelerometers and microphones are then fused together through a statistical weighting approach based on principal component analysis. Using the highlighted and fused features, we demonstrate that different gear faults can be effectively detected and identified.

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