Discrete Wavelet Design for Bearing Fault Diagnosis Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Rolling bearings are widely used in a large variety of industrial applications. Therefore, it is necessary to provide an efficient fault detection and diagnosis mechanism to prevent component failure and poor performance during operation. This paper proposes a novel classification scheme based on the design of discrete wavelets best adapted to vibration signal analysis in order to identify and properly classify rolling bearing defects. Through polyphase representation of the wavelet filter bank, and using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, the appropriate discrete wavelet associated filters are optimized to achieve the best fault classification accuracy. Simulation results show that the proposed wavelet design approach outperforms the well-known standard wavelets regardless the employed classifier and leads to an average fault classification improvement of about 2%.