An adaptive envelope spectrum technique for bearing fault detection

Abstract

In this work, an adaptive envelope spectrum (AES) technique is proposed for bearing fault detection, especially for analyzing signals with transient events. The proposed AES technique first modulates the signal using the empirical mode decomposition to formulate the representative intrinsic mode functions (IMF), and then a novel IMF reconstruction method is proposed based on a correlation analysis of the envelope spectra. The reconstructed signal is post-processed by using an adaptive filter to enhance impulsive signatures, where the filter length is optimized by the proposed sparsity analysis technique. Bearing health conditions are diagnosed by examining bearing characteristic frequency information on the envelope power spectrum. The effectiveness of the proposed fault detection technique is verified by a series of experimental tests corresponding to different bearing conditions.