A new blind fault component separation algorithm for a single-channel mechanical signal mixture

A vibration signal collected from a complex machine consists of multiple vibration components, which are system responses excited by several sources. This paper reports a new blind component separation (BCS) method for extracting different mechanical fault features. By applying the proposed method, a single-channel mixed signal can be decomposed into two parts: the periodic and transient subsets. The periodic subset is related to the imbalance, misalignment and eccentricity of a machine. The transient subset refers to abnormal impulsive phenomena, such as those caused by localized bearing faults. The proposed method includes two individual strategies to deal with these different characteristics. The first extracts the sub-Gaussian periodic signal by minimizing the kurtosis of the equalized signals. The second detects the super-Gaussian transient signal by minimizing the smoothness index of the equalized signals. Here, the equalized signals are derived by an eigenvector algorithm that is a successful solution to the blind equalization problem. To reduce the computing time needed to select the equalizer length, a simple optimization method is introduced to minimize the kurtosis and smoothness index, respectively. Finally, simulated multiple-fault signals and a real multiple-fault signal collected from an industrial machine are used to validate the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method is able to effectively decompose the multiple-fault vibration mixture into periodic components and random non-stationary transient components. In addition, the equalizer length can be intelligently determined using the proposed method.     

A Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on PAVME and MEDE

When rolling bearings have a local fault, the real bearing vibration signal related to the local fault is characterized by the properties of nonlinear and nonstationary. To extract the useful fault features from the collected nonlinear and nonstationary bearing vibration signals and improve diagnostic accuracy, this paper proposes a new bearing fault diagnosis method based on parameter adaptive variational mode extraction (PAVME) and multiscale envelope dispersion entropy (MEDE). Firstly, a new method hailed as parameter adaptive variational mode extraction (PAVME) is presented to process the collected original bearing vibration signal and obtain the frequency components related to bearing faults, where its two important parameters (i.e., the penalty factor and mode center-frequency) are automatically determined by whale optimization algorithm. Subsequently, based on the processed bearing vibration signal, an effective complexity evaluation approach named multiscale envelope dispersion entropy (MEDE) is calculated for conducting bearing fault feature extraction. Finally, the extracted fault features are fed into the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) to automatically identify different health conditions of rolling bearing. Case studies and contrastive analysis are performed to validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can not only effectively extract bearing fault features, but also obtain a high identification accuracy for bearing fault patterns under single or variable speed.     

Maximum cross-correlated kurtosis-based unsaturated stochastic resonance and its application to bearing fault diagnosis

Considering the random impulses of mechanical noise and the limitations involved while identifying mechanical fault impulse signals via traditional measurement indices of signal-to-noise ratio, which require the characteristic frequency to be known in advance, this study proposes an adaptive unsaturated stochastic resonance method employing maximum cross-correlated kurtosis as the signal detection index. The proposed method combines the features of a cross-correlated coefficient to indicate periodic fault transients and those of spectrum kurtosis to locate these transients in the frequency domain. Actual vibration signals collected from motor and gear bearings subjected to heavy noise are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Through a coarse tree-based machine learning method, the proposed method is verified to be more suitable for explaining the periodic impulse components of bearing signals, as compared to the ensemble empirical mode decomposition denoising method and unsaturated stochastic resonance using the kurtosis-intercorrelation index.     

Wayside acoustic defective bearing detection based on improved Dopplerlet transform and Doppler transient matching

The diagnosis of train bearing defects plays a significant role in maintaining the safety of railway transport. However, the phenomenon of Doppler Effect in the acoustic signal recorded by the wayside Acoustic Defective Bearing Detector (ADBD) system leads to the difficulty for fault diagnosis of train bearings with a high moving speed. This paper proposes a double-searching solution based on improved Dopplerlet transform and Doppler transient matching to overcome the difficulty in wayside acoustic bearing diagnosis. In the solution, the first searching procedure is to extract necessary parameters of Doppler Effect under the situation with very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) based on an improved Dopplerlet transform. Using the obtained parameters, the Doppler Effect can be embedded into the constructed periodic Laplace wavelet transient models. Subsequently, the second searching procedure is conducted to search fault impact period of the defective bearing through an operation, called Doppler transient matching, which is to calculate the correlation coefficient between the Doppler transient model and the filtered raw signal with the Doppler Effect. The proposed double-searching algorithm can adapt to the real Doppler Effect situation and extract the exact fault impact period from the Doppler distorted signal, and thus shows powerful capability to analyze wayside acoustic signals from train bearings. The proposed wayside acoustic diagnostic scheme is verified by means of a simulated Doppler distorted signal with a very low SNR (−20 dB) and the experiments conducted on train bearings. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm is effective and has obvious advantages for ADBD system.     

基于HHT变换的起动电动机特征信号时频分析

针对车辆起动电动机电气和机械故障发生时特征信号的时变不平稳特性,进行了时频域分析处理,提出了利用现代信号处理方法对故障信号提取特征向量的方法,主要对起动电动机的电枢和轴承故障进行诊断。在构建电机故障测试实验平台的基础上,利用破坏性实验构造了故障类型,测取了电枢电流和振动信号,分别采用小波分析理论和HHT变换对信号进行分析,通过分解再重构的方式将信号分解成了频率由高到低的不同分量,并获得了故障的特征频率,提取了特征向量。实验结果表明,基于HHT变换的现代信号处理方法在处理时变非平稳信号方面比小波分析理论更具有自适应性,更易识别。     

利用声信号对滚动轴承进行故障诊断的研究

旋转机械在运行过程中产生的声信号包含了滚动轴承的运行状态信息,且可采用非接触式测量,本文应用它对滚动轴承进行故障诊断。基于morlet小波变换的包络分析对采集的声信号进行降噪及包络处理,然后变换到频域,提取出特征频率并经过转换后作为线性神经网路的输入向量,辨识滚动轴承的状态。实验表明,本方法对滚动轴承故障诊断是有效的。     

Feature extraction for rolling element bearing fault diagnosis utilizing generalized S transform and two-dimensional non-negative matrix factorization

This paper presents a novel feature extraction scheme for roller bearing fault diagnosis utilizing generalized S transform and two-dimensional non-negative matrix factorization (2DNMF). The generalized S transform, which can make up the poor energy concentration of the standard S transform, is introduced to generate the time-frequency representation (TFR). Experiment results on simulated signal and vibration signals measured from rolling element bearings have revealed that the generalized S transform can obtain a more satisfactory TFR than other similar techniques. Furthermore, a new technique called two-dimensional non-negative matrix factorization (2DNMF), which can reduce the computation cost and preserve more structure information hiding in original 2D matrices compared to the NMF, is developed to extract more informative features from the time-frequency matrixes for accurate fault classification. Experimental results on bearing faults classification have demonstrated that the proposed feature extraction scheme has an advantage over other similar feature extraction approaches.     

Application of correlation matching for automatic bearing fault diagnosis

This paper introduces an automatic feature extraction algorithm for bearing fault diagnosis using correlation filtering-based matching pursuit. This algorithm is described and investigated in theory and practice on both simulated and real bearing vibration signals. First, the vibration model for rolling bearing with fault is derived. Then, the numerical simulation signal being taken as an example, the principle of matching pursuit is mathematically explained and its drawbacks are analyzed. Afterward, to enhance the similarity of model related to the bearing faulty impulses, the model shape parameters are optimized using spectrum kurtosis and smoothing index. After that, the model with optimum shape and period parameters is taken as a template to approximate the impulses in faulty bearing signal. Finally, based on maximizing correlation principle, the optimized cycle parameter being as impuls e repetition period is matched up. The proposed method has been successfully applied in actual vibration signals of rolling element bearing with different faults.     

Exchanged ridge demodulation of time-scale manifold for enhanced fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

The vibration or acoustic signal from rotating machinery with localized fault usually behaves as the form of amplitude modulation (AM) and/or frequency modulation (FM). The demodulation techniques are conventional ways to reveal the fault characteristics from the analyzed signals. One of these techniques is the time-scale manifold (TSM) ridge demodulation method with the merits of good time–frequency localization and in-band noise suppression properties. However, due to the essential attribute of wavelet ridge, the survived in-band noise on the achieved TSM will still disturb the envelope extraction of fault-induced impulses. This paper presents an improved TSM ridge demodulation method, called exchanged ridge demodulation of TSM, by combining the benefits of the first two TSMs: the noise suppression of the first TSM and the noise separation of the second TSM. Specifically, the ridge on the second TSM can capture the fault-induced impulses precisely while avoiding the in-band noise smartly. By putting this ridge on the first TSM, the corresponding instantaneous amplitude (IA) waveform can represent the real envelope of pure faulty impulses. Moreover, an adaptive selection method for Morlet wavelet parameters is also proposed based on the smoothness index (SI) in the time-scale domain for an optimal time-scale representation of analyzed signal. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by means of a simulation study and applications to diagnosis of bearing defects and gear fault.     

基于复小波包分形理论的爬壁机器人故障检测

通过研究爬壁式机器人的控制和运动特征，提出一种基于复小波包分形理论的故障检测方法．利用复小波包的平移不变性，将爬壁式机器人传感器输出信号分解成独立的频谱，并进行阀值处理和重构，从而有效去除高频噪音并提取故障的特征频率；依据信号分形维数的多尺度不变性，在嵌入维数空间，采用维数最大距离法，确定复小波包域故障信号的关联雏数．仿真实验表明，爬壁式机器人在各种异常工作模式下的故障信号关联维数能比较真实地反映其故障状态空间，同时也验证了故障信号的关联维数低于正常信号的关联维数作为故障发生与否的定量判据的正确性．     

Low speed bearing fault diagnosis using acoustic emission sensors

In this paper, a new methodology for low speed bearing fault diagnosis is presented. This acoustic emission (AE) based technique starts with a heterodyne frequency reduction approach that samples AE signals at a rate comparable to vibration centered methodologies. Then, the sampled AE signal is time synchronously resampled to account for possible fluctuations in shaft speed and bearing slippage. The resampling approach is able to segment the AE signal according to shaft crossing times such that an even number of data points are available to compute a single spectral average which is used to extract features and evaluate numerous condition indicators (CIs) for bearing fault diagnosis. Unlike existing averaging based noise reduction approaches that require the computation of multiple averages for each bearing fault type, the presented approach computes only one average for all bearing fault types. The presented technique is validated using the AE signals of seeded fault steel bearings on a bearing test rig. The results in this paper have shown that the low sampled AE signals in combination with the presented approach can be utilized to effectively extract condition indicators to diagnose all four bearing fault types at multiple low shaft speeds below 10 Hz.     

Wavelet filter-based weak signature detection method and its application on rolling element bearing prognostics

De-noising and extraction of the weak signature are crucial to fault prognostics in which case features are often very weak and masked by noise. The wavelet transform has been widely used in signal de-noising due to its extraordinary time-frequency representation capability. In this paper, the performance of wavelet decomposition-based de-noising and wavelet filter-based de-noising methods are compared based on signals from mechanical defects. The comparison result reveals that wavelet filter is more suitable and reliable to detect a weak signature of mechanical impulse-like defect signals, whereas the wavelet decomposition de-noising method can achieve satisfactory results on smooth signal detection. In order to select optimal parameters for the wavelet filter, a two-step optimization process is proposed. Minimal Shannon entropy is used to optimize the Morlet wavelet shape factor. A periodicity detection method based on singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to choose the appropriate scale for the wavelet transform. The signal de-noising results from both simulated signals and experimental data are presented and both support the proposed method.     

Subway Gearbox Fault Diagnosis Algorithm Based on Adaptive Spline Impact Suppression

In the signal processing of real subway vehicles, impacts between wheelsets and rail joint gaps have significant negative effects on the spectrum. This introduces great difficulties for the fault diagnosis of gearboxes. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an adaptive time-domain signal segmentation method that envelopes the original signal using a cubic spline interpolation. The peak values of the rail joint gap impacts are extracted to realize the adaptive segmentation of gearbox fault signals when the vehicle was moving at a uniform speed. A long-time and unsteady signal affected by wheel–rail impacts is segmented into multiple short-term, steady-state signals, which can suppress the high amplitude of the shock response signal. Finally, on this basis, multiple short-term sample signals are analyzed by time- and frequency-domain analyses and compared with the nonfaulty results. The results showed that the method can efficiently suppress the high-amplitude components of subway gearbox vibration signals and effectively extract the characteristics of weak faults due to uniform wear of the gearbox in the time and frequency domains. This provides reference value for the gearbox fault diagnosis in engineering practice.     

Matching pursuit of an adaptive impulse dictionary for bearing fault diagnosis

The sparse decomposition based on matching pursuit is an adaptive sparse expression of the signals. An adaptive matching pursuit algorithm that uses an impulse dictionary is introduced in this article for rolling bearing vibration signal processing and fault diagnosis. First, a new dictionary model is established according to the characteristics and mechanism of rolling bearing faults. The new model incorporates the rotational speed of the bearing, the dimensions of the bearing and the bearing fault status, among other parameters. The model can simulate the impulse experienced by the bearing at different bearing fault levels. A simulation experiment suggests that a new impulse dictionary used in a matching pursuit algorithm combined with a genetic algorithm has a more accurate effect on bearing fault diagnosis than using a traditional impulse dictionary. However, those two methods have some weak points, namely, poor stability, rapidity and controllability. Each key parameter in the dictionary model and its influence on the analysis results are systematically studied, and the impulse location is determined as the primary model parameter. The adaptive impulse dictionary is established by changing characteristic parameters progressively. The dictionary built by this method has a lower redundancy and a higher relevance between each dictionary atom and the analyzed vibration signal. The matching pursuit algorithm of an adaptive impulse dictionary is adopted to analyze the simulated signals. The results indicate that the characteristic fault components could be accurately extracted from the noisy simulation fault signals by this algorithm, and the result exhibited a higher efficiency in addition to an improved stability, rapidity and controllability when compared with a matching pursuit approach that was based on a genetic algorithm. We experimentally analyze the early-stage fault signals and composite fault signals of the bearing. The results further demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the matching pursuit algorithm that uses the adaptive impulse dictionary. Finally, this algorithm is applied to the analysis of engineering data, and good results are achieved.     

Low-Pass Filtering Empirical Wavelet Transform Machine Learning Based Fault Diagnosis for Combined Fault of Wind Turbines

Fault diagnosis of wind turbines is of great importance to reduce operating and maintenance costs of wind farms. At present, most wind turbine fault diagnosis methods are focused on single faults, and the methods for combined faults usually depend on inefficient manual analysis. Filling the gap, this paper proposes a low-pass filtering empirical wavelet transform (LPFEWT) machine learning based fault diagnosis method for combined fault of wind turbines, which can identify the fault type of wind turbines simply and efficiently without human experience and with low computation costs. In this method, low-pass filtering empirical wavelet transform is proposed to extract fault features from vibration signals, LPFEWT energies are selected to be the inputs of the fault diagnosis model, a grey wolf optimizer hyperparameter tuned support vector machine (SVM) is employed for fault diagnosis. The method is verified on a wind turbine test rig that can simulate shaft misalignment and broken gear tooth faulty conditions. Compared with other models, the proposed model has superiority for this classification problem.     

Continuous-scale mathematical morphology-based optimal scale band demodulation of impulsive feature for bearing defect diagnosis

Integer-scale structuring element is usually used in the traditional mathematical morphology (MM) for signal processing. When applied for impulsive feature demodulation of vibration signal of rolling element bearings, the integer-scale MM (ISMM) may lead to low resolution result and thus undermines its defect diagnosis capability. For this reason, this paper proposes a continuous-scale MM (CSMM) scheme by interpolation and re-sampling to improve scale resolution for more reliable fault signature extraction. Based on the frequency domain kurtosis criterion, a narrowband merging operation is employed to locate the optimal scale band that best reflects the impulsive feature from the CSMM analysis results. The demodulated components in the optimal scale band are employed to detect the existence of the bearing fault. The proposed optimal CSMM demodulation technique is evaluated using both simulated and experimental bearing vibration signals. The results show that, the CSMM is capable of generating demodulation signals with higher resolution, and the optimal scale band demodulation based on the CSMM can reliably extract impulsive features for bearing defect diagnosis.     

Rolling bearing diagnosing method based on Empirical Mode Decomposition of machine vibration signal

Rolling bearing faults are one of the major reasons for breakdown of industrial machinery and bearing diagnosing is one of the most important topics in machine condition monitoring.The main problem in industrial application of bearing vibration diagnostics is the masking of informative bearing signal by machine noise. The vibration signal of the rolling bearing is often covered or concealed by other structural vibrations sources, such as gears. Although a number of vibration diagnostic techniques have been developed over the last several years, in many cases these methods are quite complicated in use or only effective at later stages of damage development. This paper presents an EMD-based rolling bearing diagnosing method that shows potential for bearing damage detection at a much earlier stage of damage development.By using EMD a raw vibration signal is decomposed into a number of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). Then, a new method of IMFs aggregation into three Combined Mode Functions (CMFs) is applied and finally the vibration signal is divided into three parts of signal: noise-only part, signal-only part and trend-only part. To further bearing fault-related feature extraction from resultant signals, the spectral analysis of the empirically determined local amplitude is used. To validate the proposed method, raw vibration signals generated by complex mechanical systems employed in the industry (driving units of belt conveyors), including normal and fault bearing vibration data, are used in two case studies. The results show that the proposed rolling bearing diagnosing method can identify bearing faults at early stages of their development.     

Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on VMD-MPE and PSO-SVM

The goal of the paper is to present a solution to improve the fault detection accuracy of rolling bearings. The method is based on variational mode decomposition (VMD), multiscale permutation entropy (MPE) and the particle swarm optimization-based support vector machine (PSO-SVM). Firstly, the original bearing vibration signal is decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMF) by using the VMD method, and the feature energy ratio (FER) criterion is introduced to reconstruct the bearing vibration signal. Secondly, the multiscale permutation entropy of the reconstructed signal is calculated to construct multidimensional feature vectors. Finally, the constructed multidimensional feature vector is fed into the PSO-SVM classification model for automatic identification of different fault patterns of the rolling bearing. Two experimental cases are adopted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve a higher identification accuracy compared with some similar available methods (e.g., variational mode decomposition-based multiscale sample entropy (VMD-MSE), variational mode decomposition-based multiscale fuzzy entropy (VMD-MFE), empirical mode decomposition-based multiscale permutation entropy (EMD-MPE) and wavelet transform-based multiscale permutation entropy (WT-MPE)).     

小波包和GA-SVM在轴承故障诊断中的应用

为了解决傅里叶变换难以兼顾信号在时域和频域中的全貌和局部化特征以及支持向量机惩罚参数 和核函数参数 选取的问题,提出了基于小波包和GA-SVM的轴承故障诊断方法。首先通过实验采集多种工况下故障轴承和正常轴承的振动信号,从振动信号中提取能够表征轴承运行状态的时频域特征以及基于小波包分析的特征向量来作为GA-SVM的输入,然后在SVM的基础上,针对SVM的惩罚参数和核函数参数在不同应用场景下的取值难以确定的特性,采用了遗传算法对支持向量机进行参数优化的GA-SVM算法进行模式识别。实验结果显示,基于小波包和GA-SVM的轴承故障诊断方法比SVM和BP都具有更高的识别精度。     

A time domain approach to diagnose gearbox fault based on measured vibration signals

Spectral analysis techniques to process vibration measurements have been widely studied to characterize the state of gearboxes. However, in practice, the modulated sidebands resulting from the local gear fault are often difficult to extract accurately from an ambiguous/blurred measured vibration spectrum due to the limited frequency resolution and small fluctuations in the operating speed of the machine that often occurs in an industrial environment. To address this issue, a new time-domain diagnostic algorithm is developed and presented herein for monitoring of gear faults, which shows an improved fault extraction capability from such measured vibration signals. This new time-domain fault detection method combines the fast dynamic time warping (Fast DTW) as well as the correlated kurtosis (CK) techniques to characterize the local gear fault, and identify the corresponding faulty gear and its position. Fast DTW is employed to extract the periodic impulse excitations caused from the faulty gear tooth using an estimated reference signal that has the same frequency as the nominal gear mesh harmonic and is built using vibration characteristics of the gearbox operation under presumed healthy conditions. This technique is beneficial in practical analysis to highlight sideband patterns in situations where data is often contaminated by process/measurement noises and small fluctuations in operating speeds that occur even at otherwise presumed steady-state conditions. The extracted signal is then resampled for subsequent diagnostic analysis using CK technique. CK takes advantages of the periodicity of the geared faults; it is used to identify the position of the local gear fault in the gearbox. Based on simulated gear vibration signals, the Fast DTW and CK based approach is shown to be useful for condition monitoring in both fixed axis as well as epicyclic gearboxes. Finally the effectiveness of the proposed method in fault detection of gears is validated using experimental signals from a planetary gearbox test rig. For fault detection in planetary gear-sets, a window function is introduced to account for the planet motion with respect to the fixed sensor, which is experimentally determined and is later employed for the estimation of reference signal used in Fast DTW algorithm.