Integrated early fault diagnosis method based on direct fast iterative filtering decomposition and effective weighted sparseness kurtosis to rolling bearings

Abstract

The fault vibration signal of rolling bearing is typical non-stationary and non-linear signals. It usually exhibits the characteristics of amplitude modulation and frequency modulation (AM-FM) due to the interaction between the various components within the bearing and modulation of the rotor speed. In addition, the incipient weak fault feature information is inevitably masked by the strong background noise and other vibration interference because of the influence of the working environment of mechanical equipment. Therefore, new high efficiency and effective processing methods are indispensable for feature extraction of bearing fault diagnosis signals. Direct fast iterative filtering (dFIF) is a new kind of adaptive mode decomposition method proposed by Antonio Cicone based on iterative filtering (IF) and fast iterative filtering (FIF). dFIF is used to quickly decompose multi-component signals into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by means of fast Fourier transform (FFT). In order to study the decomposition performance and examine the feature extraction ability of the dFIF method, a group of harmonic signals with simple linear superposition, multi-components AM-FM signals with different data length and different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are simulated and analyzed. For comparison, other mode decomposition methods were also applied to the simulated signals, such as adaptive local iterative filtering (ALIF), local mean decomposition (LMD), and empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The results show that dFIF decomposition methods have faster decomposition speed and better accuracy than other methods. Furthermore, the results also demonstrate excellent performance in AM-FM feature extraction and anti-mode mixing. On the other hand, the effective weighted sparseness kurtosis (EWSK) index integrates the periodicity and intensity of impact in each mode, which can effectively identify the effective mode. Therefore, considering the above merits, EWSK is integrated on the dFIF to effectively accomplish the fault diagnosis for rolling bearing under strong background noise. Firstly, the raw vibration signals of rolling bearing fault are decomposed into a set of IMFs by using dFIF. The EWSK indicator is then utilized to select IMFs with rich bearing fault impulse information for reconstruction. Finally, the Hilbert envelope demodulation analysis is used to analyze the reconstructed signal, extract the bearing fault feature and then judge the fault type. This proposed method is applied to analyze the simulated and field measured vibration signals of rolling bearing faults. Simultaneously, the other above-mentioned adaptive TFA methods are also adopted to analyze the signals. The results compared show that the proposed method has excellent performance in the aspects of decomposition speed and accuracy under the influence of strong background noise. It demonstrates the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method for signal processing and fault pattern recognition of rolling bearings.