Automatic fault feature extraction of mechanical anomaly on induction motor bearing using ensemble super-wavelet transform

• Using TQWT in feature extraction of motor bearing׳s early weak fault.
• A fault feature ratio is defined based on Hilbert transform.
• An ensemble super-wavelet transform for fault feature extraction is proposed.
• Effectiveness of ESW is verified via numerical simulations.
• ESW is applied to two engineering applications to verify its effectiveness.

Mechanical anomaly is a major failure type of induction motor. It is of great value to detect the resulting fault feature automatically. In this paper, an ensemble super-wavelet transform (ESW) is proposed for investigating vibration features of motor bearing faults. The ESW is put forward based on the combination of tunable Q-factor wavelet transform (TQWT) and Hilbert transform such that fault feature adaptability is enabled. Within ESW, a parametric optimization is performed on the measured signal to obtain a quality TQWT basis that best demonstrate the hidden fault feature. TQWT is introduced as it provides a vast wavelet dictionary with time-frequency localization ability. The parametric optimization is guided according to the maximization of fault feature ratio, which is a new quantitative measure of periodic fault signatures. The fault feature ratio is derived from the digital Hilbert demodulation analysis with an insightful quantitative interpretation. The output of ESW on the measured signal is a selected wavelet scale with indicated fault features. It is verified via numerical simulations that ESW can match the oscillatory behavior of signals without artificially specified. The proposed method is applied to two engineering cases, signals of which were collected from wind turbine and steel temper mill, to verify its effectiveness. The processed results demonstrate that the proposed method is more effective in extracting weak fault features of induction motor bearings compared with Fourier transform, direct Hilbert envelope spectrum, different wavelet transforms and spectral kurtosis.