A bearing vibration data analysis based on spectral kurtosis and ConvNet

Abstract

Today’s modern industry has accepted condition monitoring based on intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating machinery systems to provide precision and sustainability. The conventional signal processing methods are less productive due to the involvement of various noises from different sources in the vibration signal, and therefore, recently fault diagnosis approaches use the artificial intelligent techniques along with the signal processing methods. Thus, motivated by the kurtogram and convolutional neural network (CNN), a novel efficient method for the fault classification of rotating machines is proposed in this paper. Kurtogram is a measure of dispersion for time–frequency energy density which provides additional frequency contents information and as an effect represents a pattern of each fault uniquely. Thus, it inspires to utilize the kurtogram as an input feature vector, and it helps in reducing the task of identifying dominant features to represent the different faults. Hence, this 2D distinct feature vector presented to CNN for fault classification. The various levels of kurtogram are examined by tuning different hyperparameters of CNN to achieve a good feature set for decent performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively classifies the bearing faults under different operating conditions in comparison to other methods.