For rolling bearing diagnosis, the major challenge of signal processing technique is to extract the quasi-periodic impulses which generated by rolling bearing fault, especially when rolling bearing operated in the condition of heavy noise. This paper proposed a new bearing fault diagnosis scheme. First, the Minimum Entropy Deconvolution (MED) is taken to obtain the impulse excitations from the bearing vibration signal. Then, two kinds of morphological filter, named average filter(AVG) and difference filter (DIF), are used as the assisted filtering unit to reduce the random noise in original signal and integrate the positive and negative impulse excitations in MED filtered signal, respectively. At last, the STFT based ridge demodulation analysis is applied to the purified signal, and the bearing fault is easily identified by spectral analysis of the demodulated signal. Two simulated signal are analyzed to test the performance of the proposed scheme. In the first case, the periodic impulse signal adding with random noise is analyzed. The result shows that MED-AVG-DIA is the best scheme for impulse feature extraction. In the second case, the pure impulse signal which filtered by MED is analyzed. The result shows that STFT based ridge demodulation analysis can achieve better demodulation effect than other demodulation methods. The proposed fault diagnosis scheme has been further verified by simulation signal and measured vibration signals of defective bearing. The result shown that the proposed scheme is feasible and effective for the fault diagnosis of rolling bearing
