An improved empirical wavelet transform and its applications in rolling bearing fault diagnosis

Abstract

As essential but easily damaged parts of rotating machinery, rolling bearings have been deeply researched and widely used in mechanical processes. The real-time detection of bearing state and simple, rapid, and accurate diagnosis of bearing fault are indispensable to the industrial system. The bearing's inner ring and outer ring vibration acceleration can be measured by high-precision sensors, and the running state of the bearing can be effectively extracted. The empirical wavelet transform (EWT) can adaptively decompose the vibration acceleration signal into a series of empirical modes. However, this method not only runs slowly, but also causes inexplicable empirical modes due to the unreasonable boundaries of the frequency domain division. In this paper, a new method is proposed to improve the empirical wavelet transform by dividing the boundaries from the spectrum, named the fast empirical wavelet transform (FEWT). The proposed method chooses different points in the Fourier transform of the spectrum (key function) to reconstruct the trend component of the spectrum. The minimum points in the trend component divide the spectrum into a series of bands. A more reasonable set of boundaries can be found by choosing appropriate trend components to obtain effective empirical modes. The simulation results show that the proposed method is effective and that the acquired empirical mode is more reasonable than the EWT method. Combining kurtosis with fault feature extraction of inner and outer rings of bearings, the method is successfully applied to the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings.