A DWT and SVM based method for rolling element bearing fault diagnosis and its comparison with Artificial Neural Networks

A classification technique using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for detection of rolling element bearing fault is presented here.  The SVM was fed from features that were extracted from of vibration signals obtained from experimental setup consisting of rotating driveline that was mounted on rolling element bearings which were run in normal and with artificially faults induced conditions. The time-domain vibration signals were divided into 40 segments and simple features such as peaks in time domain and spectrum along with statistical features such as standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis etc. were extracted. Effectiveness of SVM classifier was compared with the performance of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier and it was found that the performance of SVM classifier is superior to that of ANN. The effect of pre-processing of the vibration signal by Discreet Wavelet Transform (DWT) prior to feature extraction is also studied and it is shown that pre-processing of vibration signal with DWT enhances the effectiveness of both ANN and SVM classifiers. It has been demonstrated from experiment results that performance of SVM classifier is better than ANN in detection of bearing condition and pre-processing the vibration signal with DWT improves the performance of SVM classifier.