Automated Bearing Fault Diagnosis Using 2D Analysis of Vibration Acceleration Signals under Variable Speed Conditions

Traditional fault diagnosis methods of bearings detect characteristic defect frequencies in the envelope power spectrum of the vibration signal. These defect frequencies depend upon the inherently nonstationary shaft speed. Time-frequency and subband signal analysis of vibration signals has been used to deal with random variations in speed, whereas design variations require retraining a new instance of the classifier for each operating speed. This paper presents an automated approach for fault diagnosis in bearings based upon the 2D analysis of vibration acceleration signals under variable speed conditions. Images created from the vibration signals exhibit unique textures for each fault, which show minimal variation with shaft speed. Microtexture analysis of these images is used to generate distinctive fault signatures for each fault type, which can be used to detect those faults at different speeds. A -nearest neighbor classifier trained using fault signatures generated for one operating speed is used to detect faults at all the other operating speeds. The proposed approach is tested on the bearing fault dataset of Case Western Reserve University, and the results are compared with those of a spectrum imaging-based approach.