Fuzzy determination of informative frequency band for bearing fault detection

Detecting early faults in rolling element bearings is a crucial measure for the health maintenance of rotating machinery. As faulty features of bearings are usually demodulated into a high-frequency band, determining the informative frequency band (IFB) from the vibratory signal is a challenging task for weak fault detection. Existing approaches for IFB determination often divide the frequency spectrum of the signal into even partitions, one of which is regarded as the IFB by an individual selector. This work proposes a fuzzy technique to select the IFB with improvements in two aspects. On the one hand, an IFB-specific fuzzy clustering method is developed to segment the frequency spectrum into meaningful sub-bands. Considering the shortcomings of the individual selectors, on the other hand, three commonly-used selectors are combined using a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method to guide the clustering. Among all the meaningful sub-bands, the one with the minimum comprehensive cost is determined as the IFB. The bearing faults, if any, can be detected from the demodulated envelope spectrum of the IFB. The proposed fuzzy technique was evaluated using both simulated and experimental data, and then compared with the state-of-the-art peer method. The results indicate that the proposed fuzzy technique is capable of generating a better IFB, and is suitable for detecting bearing faults

Performance of Envelope Demodulation for Bearing Damage Detection on {CWRU} Accelerometric Data: Kurtogram and Traditional Indicators vs. Targeted a Posteriori Band Indicators

Envelope demodulation of vibration signals is surely one of the most successful methods of analysis for highlighting diagnostic information of rolling element bearings incipient faults. From a mathematical perspective, the selection of a proper demodulation band can be regarded as an optimization problem involving a utility function to assess the demodulation performance in a particular band and a scheme to move within the search space of all the possible frequency bands {f, Df} (center frequency and band size) towards the optimal one. In most of cases, kurtosis-based indices are used to select the proper demodulation band. Nevertheless, to overcome the lack of robustness to non-Gaussian noise, different utility functions can be found in the literature. One of these is the kurtosis of the unbiased autocorrelation of the squared envelope of the filtered signal found in the autogram. These heuristics are usually sufficient to highlight the defect spectral lines in the demodulated signal spectrum (i.e., usually the squared envelope spectrum (SES)), enabling bearings diagnostics. Nevertheless, it is not always the case. In this work, then, posteriori band indicators based on SES defect spectral lines are proposed to assess the general envelope demodulation performance and the goodness of traditional indicators. The CaseWestern Reserve University bearing dataset is used as a test case

Simultaneous faults identification of rolling element bearings and gears by combining kurtogram and independent component analysis

A combination of kurtogram and independent component analysis (ICA) is proposed in this paper to identify the faults of rolling element bearings (REBs) and gears existing simultaneously in a gearbox. In the proposed scheme, multi-channel vibrations are picked up from the gearbox at first. Then, the fast kurtogram algorithm is employed to extract the envelopes of each vibration from different channels. Subsequently, the envelopes are separated by an ICA algorithm into independent envelope components according to different sources. Finally, the characteristic frequencies of both the faulty REB and the faulty gear can be exposed simultaneously in the envelope spectral plots. A simulation and an experimental test are introduced to show the effectiveness of the proposed method

Novel technology based on the spectral kurtosis and wavelet transform for rolling bearing diagnosis

A novel diagnosis technology combining the benefits of spectral kurtosis and wavelet transform is proposed and validated for early defect diagnosis of rolling element bearings. A systematic procedure for feature calculation is proposed and rules for selection of technology parameters are explained. Experimental validation of the proposed method carried out for early detection of the inner race defect. A comparison between frequency band selection through wavelets and spectral kurtosis is also presented. It has been observed that the frequency band selected using spectral kurtosis provide better separation between healthy and defective bearings compared to the frequency band selection using wavelet. In terms of Fisher criterion the use of spectral kurtosis has a gain of 2.75 times compared to the wavelet

Fast Computation of the Autogram for the Detection of Transient Faults

Structures and machines maintenance is a hot topic, as their failure can be both expensive and dangerous. Condition-based maintenance regimes are ever more desired so that cost-effective, reliable, and damage-responsive diagnostics techniques are needed. Among the others, Vibration Monitoring using accelerometers is a very little invasive technique that can in principle detect also small, incipient damages. Focusing on transient faults, one reliable processing to highlight their presence is the Envelope analysis of the vibration signal filtered in a band of interest. The challenge of selecting an appropriate band for the demodulation is an optimization problem requiring two ingredients: a utility function to evaluate the performance in a particular band, and a scheme to move within the search space of all the possible center frequencies and band sizes (the dyad {f, Δf}) toward the optimal. These problems were effectively tackled by the Kurtogram, a brute-force computation of the kurtosis of the envelope of the filtered signal (the utility function) of every possible {f, Δf} combination. The complete exploration of the whole plane (f, Δf) is a heavy task which compromises the computational efficiency of the algorithm so that the analysis on a discrete (f, Δf) paving was implemented (Fast Kurtogram). To overcome the lack of robustness to non-Gaussian noise, different utility functions were proposed. One is the kurtosis of the unbiased autocorrelation of the squared envelope of the filtered signal found in the Autogram. To spread this improved algorithm in on-line industrial applications, a fast implementation of the Autogram is proposed in this pape

Multi-fault diagnosis for rolling element bearings based on intrinsic mode function screening and optimized least squares support vector machine

Multi-fault diagnosis of rolling element bearing is significant to avoid serious accidents and huge economic losses effectively. However, due to the vibration signal with the character of nonstationarity and nonlinearity, the detection, extraction and classification of the fault feature turn into a challenging task. This paper presents a novel method based on redundant second generation wavelet packet transform (RSGWPT), ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and optimized least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) for fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings. Firstly, this method implements an analysis combining RSGWPT-EEMD to extract the crucial characteristics from the measured signal to identify the running state of rolling element bearings, the vibration signal is adaptively decomposed into a number of modified intrinsic mode functions (modified IMFs) by two step screening processes based on the energy ratio; secondly, the matrix is formed by different level modified IMFs and singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to decompose the matrix to obtain singular value as eigenvector; finally, singular values are input to LSSVM optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) in the feature space to specify the fault type. The effectiveness of the proposed multi-fault diagnosis technique is demonstrated by applying it to both simulated signals and practical bearing vibration signals under different conditions. The results show that the proposed method is effective for the condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings

Incipient defect identification in rolling bearings using adaptive lifting scheme packet

Defects on the surface of rolling bearing elements are some of the most frequent causes of malfunctions and breakages of rotating machines. Defect detection in rolling bearings via techniques that examine changes in measured signal is a very important topic of research due to increasing demands for quality and reliability. In this paper, incipient defect identification method based on adaptive lifting scheme packet is proposed. Adaptive lifting scheme packet operators which adapt to the signal characteristic are constructed. The shock pulse value in defect sensitive frequency band is used as the defect indicator to identify the defect location and severity of rolling bearing. The proposed defect identification method is applied to analyze the experimental signal from rolling bearing with incipient inner raceway defect. The result confirms that the proposed method is accurate and robust in rolling bearing incipient defect identification