Research on Fault Feature Extraction Method of Rolling Bearing Based on SSA–VMD–MCKD

In response to the problem that nonlinear and non-stationary rolling bearing fault signals are easily disturbed by noise, which leads to the difficulty of fault feature extraction, to take full advantage of the superiority of variational mode decomposition (VMD) in noise reduction, and of maximum correlation kurtosis deconvolution (MCKD) in highlighting continuous pulses masked by noise, a method based on sparrow search algorithm (SSA), VMD, and MCKD is proposed, namely, SSA–VM–MCKD, for rolling bearing faint fault extraction. To improve the feature extraction effect, the method uses the inverse of the peak factor squared of the envelope spectrum as the fitness function, and the parameters to be determined in both algorithms are searched adaptively by SSA. Firstly, the parameter-optimized VMD is used to decompose the fault signal to obtain the intrinsic mode function (IMF) components, from which the optimal mode component is selected, and then the optimal component signal is deconvoluted by the parameter-optimized MCKD to enhance the periodic fault pulses in the optimal component signal, and finally extracts the rolling bearing fault characteristic frequency by envelope demodulation. Experiments on simulated signals and measured data show that the method can adaptively determine the parameters in VMD and MCKD, enhance the fault impact components in the signals, and effectively extract the fault characteristic frequencies of rolling bearings, with a success rate up to 100%, providing a new idea for rolling bearing fault feature extraction.