Multi-rolling element faults diagnosis of rolling bearing based on time-frequency analysis and multi-curves extraction

Abstract In industrial production, rolling bearings are widely used as key mechanical components in all types of rotating machinery. Fault diagnosis is essential for predicting bearing damage in advance, avoiding sudden equipment downtime and reducing economic losses. However, rolling element fault diagnosis of rolling bearings continues to be a challenge, especially with multi-rolling element faults. In view of the characteristics of randomness, weakness, and coupling in the vibration signal generated by multi-rolling element faults in rolling bearings, a multi-rolling element fault detection method is proposed by combination time-frequency (TF) analysis with multi-curves extraction methods. The pre-processing method combined autoregressive model with maximum correlated kurtosis deconvolution is employed to enhance the weak periodic fault impulses in the raw vibration signals of the rolling bearing. Then an improved dynamic path multi-curves extraction method is proposed to extract multiple TF curves from the TF spectrogram (TFS) constructed via short-time Fourier transform. According to the proposed classification criteria, the TF curves are classified as homologous faults. The TF masking (TFM) method is employed to keep TF information closely associated with the fault impulse. Finally, the fault signals are reconstructed sequentially based on the TFS processed by TFM, and precise identification of multi-rolling element faults is achieved by envelope analysis. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in extracting the weak fault features of multi-rolling elements and accomplishing fault separation and diagnosis.