Diagnostics 101: A tutorial for fault diagnostics of rolling element bearing using envelope analysis in MATLAB

Abstract

This paper presents a MATLAB-based tutorial to conduct fault diagnosis of a rolling element bearing. While there have been so many new developments in this field, no studies have addressed the tutorial aspects in this field to help the engineers learn the concept and implement by their own effort. The three most common techniques—the autoregressive model, spectral kurtosis, and envelope analysis—are selected to demonstrate the bearing diagnosis process. Simulation signal is introduced to help understand the characteristics of fault signal and carry out the process toward the fault identification. The techniques are then applied to the two real datasets to demonstrate the practical applications, one made by the authors and the other by the Case Western Reserve University, which is known as a standard reference in testing the diagnostic algorithms.