Fault Diagnosis Based on Acoustic Emission Signal for Low Speed Rolling Element Bearing

The fault of a bearing may cause the breakdown of a rotating machine, leading to serious consequences. A rolling element bearing is an important part of, and is widely used in rotating machinery. Therefore, fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is important for guaranteeing production efficiency and plant safety. Although many studies have been carried out with the goal of achieving fault diagnosis of a bearing, most of these works were studied for rotating machinery with a high rotating speed rather than with a low rotating speed. Fault diagnosis for bearings under a low rotating speed, is more difficult than under a high rotating speed. Because bearing faults signal is very weak under a low rotating speed. This work acquires vibration and acoustic emission signals from the rolling bearing under low speed respectively, and analyzes the both kinds of signals in time domain and frequency domain for diagnosing the typical bearing faults contrastively. This paper also discussed the advantages using the acoustic emission signal for fault diagnosis of rolling speed bearing. From the results of analysis and experiment we can find the effectiveness of acoustic emission signal is better than vibration signal for fault diagnosis of a bearing under the low speed.