Rolling Elements Bearings Degradation Indicator Based on Continuous Hidden Markov Model

Abstract

In order to obtain a sensitive bearing degradation indicator with significant trend, a new approach is proposed. For the capability of preserving the local structure of data manifold, locality preserving projections are used for features dimension reduction without missing the original information. Since continuous hidden Markov model (CHMM) can take multiple fault features into consideration and also capture the stochastic characteristics of fault features in the time domain, CHMM-based negative log likelihood probability is built as a new health assessment indication. The experiment results show that, compared with the general features, the proposed degradation indicator shows great trend of the bearing health and is more sensitive to incipient defects.