Rolling Bearing Incipient Fault Detection Based on a Multi-Resolution Singular Value Decomposition

Abstract

The periodic impulse characteristics caused by rolling bearing damage are weak in the incipient failure stage. Thus, these characteristics are always drowned out by background noise and other harmonic interference. A novel approach based on multi-resolution singular value decomposition (MRSVD) is proposed in order to extract the periodic impulse characteristics for incipient fault detection. With the MRSVD method, the vibration signal is first decomposed to obtain a group of approximate signals and detailed signals with different resolutions. The first detail signal is mainly composed of noise and the last approximate signal is mainly composed of harmonic interference. Combined with the kurtosis index, the hidden periodic impulse signal will be extracted from the detail signals (in addition to the first detail signal). Thus, the incipient fault detection of a rolling bearing can be fulfilled according to the envelope demodulation spectrum of the extracted periodic impulse signal. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated with both simulation and experimental analyses.