Underdetermined Source Separation of Bearing Faults Based on Optimized Intrinsic Characteristic-Scale Decomposition and Local Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

Since roller bearing is one of the most vulnerable components, bearing faults usually occur in an unprepared situation with multiple faults, and the quantity of sensors is limited in the real-time working environment, resulting in an underdetermined blind source separation (UBSS) problem to extract the fault features. Because the collected signals are usually not independent and not sparse enough, traditional methods of separating signals cannot perform well. In this paper, an optimized intrinsic characteristic-scale decomposition (OICD) method is proposed to solve the underdetermined problem. Meanwhile, the constraint error factor is introduced to overcome the drawback that the ideal ending condition of ICD is not proper for the vibration signal of bearing. In addition, given that non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is not limited by the source signal independence and sparsity, an improved UBSS model is constructed, and the PCs are used as the input matrix of local NMF to obtain the separation signal. Ultimately, envelope analysis is utilized to detect the source signal feature. Both simulated and experimental vibration signals are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Besides, the traditional method is juxtaposed with the suggested method. The results indicate that the proposed method is effective in dealing with the compound faults separation of the rotating machinery.