A frequency-weighted energy operator and swarm decomposition for bearing fault diagnosis

The weak fault characteristics of rolling bearings are difficult to identify due to strong background noise. To address this issue, a bearing fault detection scheme combining swarm decomposition (SWD) and frequency-weighted energy operator (FWEO) is presented. First, SWD is applied to decompose the bearing fault signal into single mode components. Then, a new evaluation index termed LEP is constructed by combining the advantages of envelope entropy, Pearson correlation coefficient and L-kurtosis, and it is utilized to choose the sensitive component containing the richest bearing fault characteristics. Finally, FWEO is employed for extracting the bearing fault features from the sensitive component. Simulation and experimental analyses indicate that the LEP index has better performance than the L-kurtosis index in determining the sensitive component. The method has the effect of suppressing noise and enhancing impulse characteristics, which is superior to the SWD-based envelope demodulation method.

Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings based on improved direct fast iterative filtering and spectral amplitude modulation

As the transient impulse components in early fault signals are weak and easily buried by strong background noise, the fault features of rolling bearings are difficult to be extracted effectively. Focusing on this issue, a novel method based on improved direct fast iterative filtering and spectral amplitude modulation (IDFIF-SAM) is presented for detecting the early fault of rolling bearings. First, the ratio of the average crest factor of autocorrelation envelope spectrum to the average envelope entropy is taken as the fitness function to search the optimal parameters of direct fast iterative filtering (DFIF) adaptively via particle swarm optimization (PSO). Then, the efficient kurtosis entropy (EKE) index is being employed to choose the suitable components to reconstruct the signal. Finally, the reconstructed signal is subjected to spectral amplitude modulation (SAM) to strengthen the impulse features. The superiority of improved direct fast iterative filtering (IDFIF) over fixed-parameter DFIF, fast iterative filtering (FIF), and hard thresholding fast iterative filtering (HTFIF) is clarified through the simulated signal. Moreover, the comparative experimental analysis shows that the proposed IDFIF-SAM method can identify the early fault feature of rolling bearings more effectively.

Rotordynamics of an Improved Face-grinding Spindle: Rotational Stiffness of Thrust Bearing Increases Radial Stiffness of Spindle

The support is a key factor affecting performance of face-grinding spindle. However, advantage of traditional rolling element bearing is not highlighted when it is for large-size face grinding. This technical brief aims to develop a combined support for the face-grinding spindle consisting of a water-lubricated hydrostatic thrust bearing and two types of radial rolling bearings, and the flexible rotor dynamics of the spindle with the combined support is analyzed using the modified transfer matrix method. The results show that the rotational stiffness of water-lubricated hydrostatic thrust bearing can increase the radial stiffness of the face-grinding spindle, so the small-size rolling bearings can be utilized as the radial support for the spindle by aid of such rotational stiffness. A comparative study of comprehensive performance between the spindle supported by rolling bearings and the replacement spindle designed with our proposed combined support shows that the proposed one has technical advantage of large axial load-carrying capacity, low frictional power loss, low temperature rise and etc.

Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings based on multi-scale deep subdomain adaptation network

This study presents a fault diagnosis method for rolling bearing based on multi-scale deep subdomain adaptation network (MSDSAN). The proposed MSDSAN, as improvement of deep subdomain adaptation network (DSAN), is an unsupervised transfer learning method. MSDSAN reduces the subdomain distribution discrepancy between domains rather than marginal distribution discrepancy, and so better domain invariant fault features are derived to avoid misalignment between domains. Aiming at avoiding fault information loss by fixed receptive fields feature extraction, selective kernel convolution module is introduced into feature extraction of MSDSAN, by which multiple receptive fields are applied to ensure an optimal receptive field for each working condition. Moreover, contribution rates are adaptively assigned to all receptive fields, and the disturbing information extracted by inappropriate receptive fields is further eliminated. As a result, more comprehensive and effective fault information is derived for bearing fault diagnosis. Fault diagnosis experiment of bearings is performed to verify the superiority of the proposed method, and the experimental results demonstrate that MSDSAN achieves better transfer effects and higher accuracy than SOTA methods under varying working conditions.

Research on Electrostatic Monitoring of Tribo-Contacts with Dynamic Adaptive Fusion Method

Electrostatic monitoring is a unique and rapid developing technique applied in the prognostics and health management of the tribological system based on electrostatic charging and sensing phenomenon. It has considerable advantages in condition monitoring of tribo-contacts with high sensitivity and resolution. Unfortunately, the monitoring result can be affected due to the switch of operating conditions that reduces its accuracy. This paper presents a dynamic adaptive fusion approach, moving window local outlier factor based on electrostatic features to overcome the influence. Life cycle experiments of rolling bearings and railcar gearbox were carried out on an electrostatic monitoring platform. The MWLOF method was used to extract and analyze the experimental data, combined with the Pauta criterion to judge wear faults quantitatively, and compare with other feature extraction results. It is verified that the proposed method can overcome the influence of changes in working conditions on the monitoring results, improve the monitoring sensitivity, and provide an accurate reference for friction and wear faults.

A novel method for diagnosing rolling bearing surface damage by electric impedance analysis

This paper presents a novel condition monitoring method for rolling bearings, based on measuring the electric bearing impedance. The method can diagnose the presence of damage by frequency-domain analysis, and its extension along the raceway by time-domain analysis. The latter enables the assessment of the severity and the progression of bearing damage. A fatigue test shows that the occurrence of pittings in the bearing raceways causes characteristic peaks in the impedance signal, and that the duration of the peaks increases during damage progression. A second test series with artificial damage shows that the duration of the peaks depends on the bearing load and the length of the damage along the raceway and confirms the explanation hypothesis.

Intelligent identification of incipient rolling bearing faults based on VMD and PCA-SVM

Rolling bearings are the key components of rotating machinery. Incipient fault diagnosis of bearing plays an increasingly important role in guaranteeing normal and safe operation of rotating machinery. However, because of the high complexity of the fault feature extraction, the incipient faults of rolling bearings are difficult to diagnose. To solve this problem, this paper presents a new incipient fault intelligent identification method of rolling bearings based on variational mode decomposition (VMD), principal component analysis (PCA), and support vector machines (SVM). In the proposed method, the bearing vibration signals are decomposed by using VMD, and a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with different frequencies are obtained. Then, the energy and kurtosis values of each IMF are calculated to reveal the intrinsic characteristics of the vibration signals in different scales. Finally, all energy and kurtosis values of IMFs are processed via PCA and subsequently fed into SVM to achieve the bearing fault identification automatically. The effectiveness of this method is verified through the experimental bearing data. The verification results indicate that the proposed method can effectively extract the bearing fault features and accurately identify the bearing incipient faults, and outperform the two compared methods obviously in identification accuracy and computation time.