An adaptive demodulation approach for bearing fault detection based on adaptive wavelet filtering and spectral subtraction

Fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings is important for improving mechanical system reliability and performance. Vibration signals contain a wealth of complex information useful for state monitoring and fault diagnosis. However, any fault-related impulses in the original signal are often severely tainted by various noises and the interfering vibrations caused by other machine elements. Narrow-band amplitude demodulation has been an effective technique to detect bearing faults by identifying bearing fault characteristic frequencies. To achieve this, the key step is to remove the corrupting noise and interference, and to enhance the weak signatures of the bearing fault. In this paper, a new method based on adaptive wavelet filtering and spectral subtraction is proposed for fault diagnosis in bearings. First, to eliminate the frequency associated with interfering vibrations, the vibration signal is bandpass filtered with a Morlet wavelet filter whose parameters (i.e. center frequency and bandwidth) are selected in separate steps. An alternative and efficient method of determining the center frequency is proposed that utilizes the statistical information contained in the production functions (PFs). The bandwidth parameter is optimized using a local 'greedy' scheme along with Shannon wavelet entropy criterion. Then, to further reduce the residual in-band noise in the filtered signal, a spectral subtraction procedure is elaborated after wavelet filtering. Instead of resorting to a reference signal as in the majority of papers in the literature, the new method estimates the power spectral density of the in-band noise from the associated PF. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using simulated data, test rig data, and vibration data recorded from the transmission system of a helicopter. The experimental results and comparisons with other methods indicate that the proposed method is an effective approach to detecting the fault-related impulses hidden in vibration signals and performs well for bearing fault diagnosis.