Condition monitoring of rolling-element bearings by using cone-kernel time-frequency distribution

A method for condition monitoring of rolling element bearings is proposed in this paper. Timefrequency analysis using a cone kernel distribution applied to the envelope signal of the bearing vibration has shown an advantage over the high frequency resonance technique. In particular it is proven to be effective for multi-fault and ball fault detection of ball bearings. A comparison of the diagnostic ability of two other timefrequency distributions (spectrogram and distribution) is also presented.