Optimal intrinsic mode function based detection of motor bearing damages

Abstract

This paper proposes a model which uses the greedy algorithm to select the optimal intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) of the empirical mode decomposition (EMD), namely the greedy empirical mode decomposition (GEMD) model. The optimal IMFs can more sufficiently represent the characteristics of damage bearings since the proposed GEMD model effectively selects some IMFs not affected by noise. To validate the superiority of the proposed GEMD model, various damage types of motor bearings were shaped by electrical discharge machining (EDM) in this experiment. The measured motor current signals of various types were decomposed to IMFs by using EMD. Then the optimal IMFs can be obtained by using the proposed GEMD model. The results show that the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) spectrums when using the optimal IMFs become easier in the detection system than when using all IMFs. Simultaneously, the detection accuracy of motor bearing damages is increased by using the features extracted from the lower complexity HHT spectrum. The average detection accuracy can be also improved from 69.5% to 74.6% by using the features extracted from the GEMD-HHT spectrum even in a noise interference 10dB.