Rolling bearings play a crucial role in rotary machinery systems, and their operating state affects the entire mechanical system. In most cases, the fault of a rolling bearing can only be identified when it has developed to a certain degree. At that moment, there is already not much time for maintenance, and could cause serious damage to the entire mechanical system. This paper proposes a novel approach to health degradation monitoring and early fault diagnosis of rolling bearings based on a complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) and improved multivariate multiscale sample entropy (MMSE). The smoothed coarse graining process was proposed to improve the conventional MMSE. Numerical simulation results indicate that CEEMDAN can alleviate the mode mixing problem and enable accurate intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and improved MMSE can reflect intrinsic dynamic characteristics of the rolling bearing more accurately. During application studies, rolling bearing signals are decomposed by CEEMDAN to obtain IMFs. Then improved MMSE values of effective IMFs are computed to accomplish health degradation monitoring of rolling bearings, aiming at identifying the early weak fault phase. Afterwards, CEEMDAN is performed to extract the fault characteristic frequency during the early weak fault phase. The experimental results indicate the proposed method can obtain a better performance than other techniques in objective analysis, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method in practical application. The theoretical derivations, numerical simulations, and application studies all confirmed that the proposed health degradation monitoring and early fault diagnosis approach is promising in the field of prognostic and fault diagnosis of rolling bearings.

Bolts are widely used in the fields of mechanical, civil, and aerospace engineering. The condition of bolt joints has a significant impact on the safe and reliable operation of the whole equipment. The failure of bolt joints monitoring leads to severe accidents or even casualties. This paper proposes a novel bolt joints monitoring method using multivariate intrinsic multiscale entropy (MIME) analysis and Lorentz signal-enhanced piezoelectric active sensing. Lorentz signal is used as excitation signal in piezoelectric active sensing to expose nonlinear dynamical characteristics of the bolt joints. Multivariate variational mode decomposition (MVMD) is employed to decompose multiple components of the collected Lorentz signal into multivariate band-limited intrinsic mode functions (BLIMFs). Afterward, improved multiscale sample entropy (IMSE) values of each channel’s BLIMFs are computed to measure its irregularity and complexity. IMSE values are taken as quantitative features, reflecting dynamical characteristics of bolt joints. Further, the constructed 3-layer feature matrices are adopted as the input of the convolutional neural network (CNN) to achieve accurate bolt joint monitoring. The multiple M1 bolt joints are used during the experiment to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate the proposed novel approach is promising in bolt joints monitoring.

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Rolling bearings are crucial components in the fields of mechanical, civil, and aerospace engineering. They sometimes work under various operating conditions, which makes it harder to distinguish faults from normal signals. Nuisance attribute projection (NAP) is a technique that has been widely used in audio and image recognition to eliminate interference information in the extracted feature space. In constructing the weighted matrix of NAP, the setting of the weighted value represents the degree of interference between the feature vectors. The interference is either taken into consideration in whole, or not considered at all, which will inevitably lead to information loss. In our work, an entropy-weighted NAP (EWNAP) is proposed to deal with such “bipolar problem” in constructing the weighted matrix. The eigenvalues of covariance matrix of collected signals contain dynamical information, and the fuzzy entropy is adopted to evaluate the dispersion degree of these eigenvalues. After normalization, these entropy values are used to express the weight relationship in the weighted matrix of EWNAP. The features processed by EWNAP can be used as samples and combined with neural network to achieve fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. Furthermore, a fault diagnosis approach with insufficient data is demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. In the case studies, Case Western Reserve University bearing database and data collected from the bearing fault simulation bench are used. These case studies show that the proposed EWNAP alleviates the interference caused by various operating conditions, and the comparative analysis confirms that the proposed method works better than the conventional methods.

Rolling bearings are important components in mechanical, civil, and aerospace engineering. The practical working conditions of rolling bearings are complex; hence, fault diagnosis of rolling bearings under various operating conditions is very challenging. This paper proposes a novel approach to fault diagnosis of rotary machinery using phase space reconstruction (PSR) of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and neural network under various operating conditions. Complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) is employed to decompose vibration signal of rotary component into IMFs denoting high-to-low instantaneous frequencies adaptively. PSR constructs one-dimensional IMFs to high-dimensional IMFs, which helps reveal the underlying nonlinear geometric topology via the reconstructed inherent and hidden dynamical characteristics of the one-dimensional vibration signal. To explore intrinsic dynamical properties, interquartile range (IQR) of Euclidean distance (ED) values of high-dimensional IMFs are extracted as condition indicators and used as input of back propagation (BP) neural network to fulfill fault identification of rolling bearings. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach have been validated by theoretical derivations, numerical simulations and experimental data. The results show that the proposed approach is promising in fault diagnosis of rotary machinery under various operating conditions.