A new method for performance degradation assessment of solid lubricated bearings

Solid lubricated bearing is a key component in spacecrafts and various other applications. Its performance degradation assessment is very important due to the demand of high reliability of aeronautic products. In this paper, a new method consists of wavelet packet decomposition and improved fuzzy c-means is proposed. The vibration signal of tested bearings is decomposed and one node is used to reconstruct the original signal. Then the energy of the reconstructed signal is calculated and the subjection of the energy to normal state is used as performance degradation indicator. Improved fuzzy c-means is used to calculate the subjection matrix. After the test, several tested bearings are observed with an scanning electron microscope.