Bearing failure diagnosis at time-varying speed based on adaptive clustered fractional Gabor transform

Abstract For bearing fault diagnosis at time-varying speed with tachometer-free and non-resampling, the crucial process is to obtain a high-resolution time-frequency representation and extract fault features. However, current multi-component non-stationary signal feature extraction methods based on time-frequency transform suffer from fixed parameter settings and insufficient resolution for low signal-to-noise ratio signals. To address these issues, a novel adaptive clustered fractional Gabor transform is proposed and applied to extract bearing fault features at time-varying speed. Firstly, the grey wolf optimization is utilized to adaptively search for the optimal fractional order and Gauss window length based on the maximum spectral kurtosis and the generalized time-bandwidth product to achieve the most adequate fractional Gabor spectrum (FrGS). Then, the Clustering by Fast Search and Find of Density Peaks algorithm reconstructs the sparse representation of the FrGS, remapping multi-component signals into single-component clusters. Bearing fault diagnosis is achieved by matching the relative order of each cluster with the bearing fault characteristic coefficients. Simulation signals validate the superiority of the feature extraction method, and experimental signals validate the feasibility of the bearing fault diagnosis method.