Degradation Feature Selection for Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Rolling Element Bearings

Rolling element bearings are among the most widely used and also vulnerable components in rotating machinery equipment. Recently, prognostics and health management of rolling element bearings is more and more attractive both in academics and industry. However, many studies have been focusing on the prognostic aspect of bearing prognostics and health management and few efforts have been performed in relation to the optimal degradation feature selection issue. For more effective and efficient remaining useful life predictions, three goodness metrics of correlation, monotonicity and robustness are defined and combined for automatically more relevant degradation feature selection in this paper. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by rolling element bearing degradation experiments. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.