Kurtosis based weighted sparse model with convex optimization technique for bearing fault diagnosis

Abstract The bearing failure, generating harmful vibrations, is one of the most frequent reasons for machine breakdowns. Thus, performing bearing fault diagnosis is an essential procedure to improve the reliability of the mechanical system and reduce its operating expenses. Most of the previous studies focused on rolling bearing fault diagnosis could be categorized into two main families, kurtosis-based filter method and wavelet-based shrinkage method. Although tremendous progresses have been made, their effectiveness suffers from three potential drawbacks: firstly, fault information is often decomposed into proximal frequency bands and results in impulsive feature frequency band splitting (IFFBS) phenomenon, which significantly degrades the performance of capturing the optimal information band; secondly, noise energy spreads throughout all frequency bins and contaminates fault information in the information band, especially under the heavy noisy circumstance; thirdly, wavelet coefficients are shrunk equally to satisfy the sparsity constraints and most of the feature information energy are thus eliminated unreasonably. Therefore, exploiting two pieces of prior information (i.e., one is that the coefficient sequences of fault information in the wavelet basis is sparse, and the other is that the kurtosis of the envelope spectrum could evaluate accurately the information capacity of rolling bearing faults), a novel weighted sparse model and its corresponding framework for bearing fault diagnosis is proposed in this paper, coined KurWSD. KurWSD formulates the prior information into weighted sparse regularization terms and then obtains a nonsmooth convex optimization problem. The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is sequentially employed to solve this problem and the fault information is extracted through the estimated wavelet coefficients. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, KurWSD overcomes the three drawbacks and utilizes the advantages of both family tools. KurWSD has three main advantages: firstly, all the characteristic information scattered in proximal sub-bands is gathered through synthesizing those impulsive dominant sub-band signals and thus eliminates the dilemma of the IFFBS phenomenon. Secondly, the noises in the focused sub-bands could be alleviated efficiently through shrinking or removing the dense wavelet coefficients of Gaussian noise. Lastly, wavelet coefficients with faulty information are reliably detected and preserved through manipulating wavelet coefficients discriminatively based on the contribution to the impulsive components. Moreover, the reliability and effectiveness of the KurWSD are demonstrated through simulated and experimental signals.