Bearing fault detection utilizing group delay and the Hilbert-Huang transform

Vibration signals measured from a mechanical system are useful to detect system faults. Signal processing has been used to extract fault information in bearing systems. However, a wide vibration signal frequency band often affects the ability to obtain the effective fault features. In addition, a few oscillation components are not useful at the entire frequency band in a vibration signal. By contrast, useful fatigue information can be embedded in the noise oscillation components. Thus, a method to estimate which frequency band contains fault information utilizing group delay was proposed in this paper. Group delay as a measure of phase distortion can indicate the phase structure relationship in the frequency domain between original (with noise) and denoising signals. We used the empirical mode decomposition of a Hilbert-Huang transform to sift the useful intrinsic mode functions based on the results of group delay after determining the valuable frequency band. Finally, envelope analysis and the energy distribution after the Hilbert transform were used to complete the fault diagnosis. The practical bearing fault data, which were divided into inner and outer race faults, were used to verify the efficiency and quality of the proposed method.