ICEEMDAN–VMD denoising method for enhanced magnetic memory detection signal of micro-defects

Ferromagnetic materials are extensively utilized in industrial settings where the early detection and repair of defects is paramount for ensuring industrial safety. During the enhanced magnetic memory detection of micro-defects, many interference signals appear in the detection signal, which makes it difficult to accurately extract the characteristics of the micro-defect signals, significantly affecting detection effectiveness. When improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN) is employed independently for signal denoising, the noise and feature signals of the transition components are retained or removed. When variational mode decomposition (VMD) is employed independently for signal denoising, the denoising effect is restricted because of the difficulty in determining the penalty factor α and the number of decomposition layers m . To solve these problems, a denoising method for enhanced magnetic memory detection signals based on ICEEMDAN and VMD, called ICEEMDAN–VMD, is proposed in this paper. First, a comprehensive index (CI) combining information entropy (IE) and the correlation coefficient R is proposed, then the signal components obtained by performing decomposition with the ICEEMDAN method are divided into noise-dominant components, transition components, and useful signal components based on the CI. Subsequently, VMD is employed to perform secondary decomposition on the transition components obtained from the ICEEMDAN method and calculate the correlation coefficients. Ultimately, the optimal VMD components and useful signal components obtained by the ICEEMDAN method are selected for signal reconstruction to obtain a denoised signal. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the denoising effects of the ICEEMDAN–VMD, ICEEMDAN, and VMD methods were compared based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and fuzzy entropy (FE). The comparison indicated that the ICEEMDAN–VMD denoising method significantly enhanced the denoising effect, and the SNRs of the components of the magnetic field signal could be increased by up to 69.426%. The SNR of each gradient component of the magnetic field signal could be improved by up to ten times, and the FEs of the signal components and their corresponding gradient components could be reduced by 24.198%–81.011%, respectively.