Health Indicator Similarity Analysis-Based Adaptive Degradation Trend Detection for Bearing Time-to-Failure Prediction

Time-to-failure (TTF) prediction of bearings is vital to the prognostic and health management of rotating machines. Owing to the shifty degradation trends (DTs) of bearings, it is still difficult to obtain accurate TTF prognostic results. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an online, continuously updated TTF prognostic method based on health indicator (HI) similarity analysis and DT detection. First, multiple degradation features are extracted and fused to construct principal component HI by using dynamic principal component analysis. Next, exponential degradation models are fitted using the HI values for future state prediction. By regarding several HI values as a tested segment, the DT is detected by analyzing the similarity of the tested segment and the fitted curve. Finally, TTF is predicted by extrapolating the DT to hit the estimated failure threshold. Two case studies based on public bearing datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods.