Remaining useful life estimation of ball bearings by means of monotonic score calibration

The estimation of remaining useful life applied to industrial machinery and its components is one of the current trends in the advanced manufacturing field. In this context, this work presents a reliable methodology applied to ball bearings health monitoring. First, the proposed methodology analyses the available vibration and temperature data by means of the Spearman coefficient. This step allows the identification of the most significant monotonic relationship between features and the evolution of the remaining useful life. The method is complemented by means of the application of one-class support vector machine in order to obtain the remaining useful life indication trough the mapping of the classification scores. The proposed scheme shows a significant accuracy and reliability of the degradation detection due to the coherent management of the information. This fact is experimentally demonstrated by a run-to-failure test bench and the comparison with classical approaches.