Fault feature extraction of rolling element bearings using sparse representation

• A bearing fault diagnosis method using sparse representation is proposed.
• Rolling element sliding and other time varying factors are taken into consideration.
• The dictionary parameters are directly identified from bearing fault signal.
• The fault impulses are reconstructed by segments.
• The method is confirmed through simulation and experimental results.

Influenced by factors such as speed fluctuation, rolling element sliding and periodical variation of load distribution and impact force on the measuring direction of sensor, the impulse response signals caused by defective rolling bearing are non-stationary, and the amplitudes of the impulse may even drop to zero when the fault is out of load zone. The non-stationary characteristic and impulse missing phenomenon reduce the effectiveness of the commonly used demodulation method on rolling element bearing fault diagnosis. Based on sparse representation theories, a new approach for fault diagnosis of rolling element bearing is proposed. The over-complete dictionary is constructed by the unit impulse response function of damped second-order system, whose natural frequencies and relative damping ratios are directly identified from the fault signal by correlation filtering method. It leads to a high similarity between atoms and defect induced impulse, and also a sharply reduction of the redundancy of the dictionary. To improve the matching accuracy and calculation speed of sparse coefficient solving, the fault signal is divided into segments and the matching pursuit algorithm is carried out by segments. After splicing together all the reconstructed signals, the fault feature is extracted successfully. The simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for the fault diagnosis of rolling element bearing in large rolling element sliding and low signal to noise ratio circumstances.