A troublesome problem in application of local mean decomposition (LMD) is that the moving averaging process is time-consuming and inaccurate in processing the mechanical vibration signals. An improved spline-LMD (SLMD) method is proposed to solve this problem. The proposed method uses the cubic spline interpolation to compute the upper and lower envelopes of a signal, and then the local mean and envelope estimate functions can be derived using the envelopes. Meanwhile, a signal extending approach based on self-adaptive waveform matching technique is applied to extend the raw signal and overcome the boundary distortion resulting from the process of computing the upper and lower envelopes. Subsequently, this paper compares SLMD with LMD in four aspects through a simulative signal. The comparative results illustrate that SLMD consumes less computation time and produces more accurate decomposed results than LMD. In the experimental part, SLMD and LMD are respectively applied to analyze the vibration signals resulting from a rotor-bearing system with rub-impact fault. The results show that SLMD can more efficiently and accurately extract the important fault features, which demonstrates that SLMD performs better than LMD in analyzing the mechanical vibration signals
