Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis under Variable Conditions Using Hilbert-Huang Transform and Singular Value Decomposition

Fault diagnosis precision for rolling bearings under variable conditions has always been unsatisfactory. To solve this problem, a fault diagnosis method combining Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT), singular value decomposition (SVD), and Elman neural network is proposed in this paper. The method includes three steps. First, instantaneous amplitude matrices were obtained by using HHT from rolling bearing signals. Second, the singular value vector was acquired by applying SVD to the instantaneous amplitude matrices, thus reducing the dimension of the instantaneous amplitude matrix and obtaining the fault feature insensitive to working condition variation. Finally, an Elman neural network was applied to the rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable working conditions according to the extracted feature vector. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively classify rolling bearing fault modes with high precision under different operating conditions. Moreover, the performance of the proposed HHT-SVD-Elman method has an advantage over that of EMD-SVD or WPT-PCA for feature extraction and Support Vector Machine (SVM) or Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) for classification.