In view of the incipient fault characteristics are difficult to be extracted from the raw bearing fault signals, an incipient bearing fault diagnosis method based on parameter-adaptive variational mode decomposition (VMD) is proposed. The beetle antennae search (BAS) algorithm is adopted to seek for the optimal combination of the VMD parameters. The reciprocals of the calculated kurtosis values of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) decomposed via VMD are employed as a fitness function in the searching process. The optimal mode number and the quadratic penalty term of VMD are adaptively set after the search. Afterwards, a vibration signal is decomposed into a set of IMFs using the parameter-adaptive VMD, and the IMF with the maximal kurtosis value is selected as the sensitive one. The selected IMF is further analyzed by Hilbert envelope demodulation. The resulting envelope spectrum can show the significant fault impulse characteristics which are highly helpful to diagnose incipient bearing faults. The kurtosis and the proportion of fault energy are introduced as the input vector of the extreme learning machine (ELM). Comparisons have been conducted via ELM to evaluate the performance by using EMD and the fixed-parameter VMD. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is more effective in extracting the incipient bearing fault characteristics.

Owing to the problem of the incipient fault characteristics being difficult to be extracted from the raw vibration signal of rolling element bearing, based on the empirical mode decomposition and kurtosis criteria, a fault diagnosis method for rolling element bearing is proposed by reducing rolling element bearing foundation vibration and noise-assisted vibration signal analysis. Firstly, rolling element bearing vibration signal is decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions using empirical mode decomposition and the intrinsic mode function component with the maximal kurtosis value is selected. Afterwards, zero mean normalization is applied to the selected intrinsic mode function component, and then the intrinsic mode function’s foundation vibration components within [Formula: see text] are removed to minimize the interference. In order to eliminate interruption and intermittency after removal of the foundation vibration components, white noise is added to the newly generated signal. The noise-added signal is decomposed via empirical mode decomposition, and later on, IMF1 with the highest frequency band is selected and demodulated using envelope analysis. The resulting envelope spectrum can show more significant fault pulse characteristics, which are highly helpful to diagnose the rolling element bearing incipient faults. The proposed method in this paper was applied to the fault diagnosis for low noise REB 6203 and the testing results showed that the method could identify the rolling element bearing incipient faults accurately and quickly.

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