A novel signal compression method based on optimal ensemble empirical mode decomposition for bearing vibration signals

Abstract

Today, remote machine condition monitoring is popular due to the continuous advancement in wireless communication. Bearing is the most frequently and easily failed component in many rotating machines. To accurately identify the type of bearing fault, large amounts of vibration data need to be collected. However, the volume of transmitted data cannot be too high because the bandwidth of wireless communication is limited. To solve this problem, the data are usually compressed before transmitting to a remote maintenance center. This paper proposes a novel signal compression method that can substantially reduce the amount of data that need to be transmitted without sacrificing the accuracy of fault identification. The proposed signal compression method is based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), which is an effective method for adaptively decomposing the vibration signal into different bands of signal components, termed intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). An optimization method was designed to automatically select appropriate EEMD parameters for the analyzed signal, and in particular to select the appropriate level of the added white noise in the EEMD method. An index termed the relative root-mean-square error was used to evaluate the decomposition performances under different noise levels to find the optimal level. After applying the optimal EEMD method to a vibration signal, the IMF relating to the bearing fault can be extracted from the original vibration signal. Compressing this signal component obtains a much smaller proportion of data samples to be retained for transmission and further reconstruction. The proposed compression method were also compared with the popular wavelet compression method. Experimental results demonstrate that the optimization of EEMD parameters can automatically find appropriate EEMD parameters for the analyzed signals, and the IMF-based compression method provides a higher compression ratio, while retaining the bearing defect characteristics in the transmitted signals to ensure accurate bearing fault diagnosis.