An improved multiscale noise tuning of stochastic resonance for identifying multiple transient faults in rolling element bearings

• Propose an improved multiscale noise tuning stochastic resonance (MSTSR) method.
• New method takes the merits of wavelet packet transform (WPT) in MST.
• Suitable for identifying multiple transient faults in rolling element bearings.
• Performance improvement is validated by simulated and practical bearing signals.

Stochastic resonance (SR), a noise-assisted tool, has been proved to be very powerful in weak signal detection. The multiscale noise tuning SR (MSTSR), which breaks the restriction of the requirement of small parameters and white noise in classical SR, has been applied to identify the characteristic frequency of a bearing. However, the multiscale noise tuning (MST), which is originally based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT), limits the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement of SR and the performance in identifying multiple bearing faults. In this paper, the wavelet packet transform (WPT) is developed and incorporated into the MSTSR method to overcome its shortcomings and to further enhance its capability in multiple faults detection of bearings. The WPT-based MST can achieve a finer tuning of multiscale noise and aims at detecting multiple target frequencies separately. By introducing WPT into the MST of SR, this paper proposes an improved SR method particularly suited for the identification of multiple transient faults in rolling element bearings. Simulated and practical bearing signals carrying multiple characteristic frequencies are employed to validate the performance improvement of the proposed method as compared to the original DWT-based MSTSR method. The results confirm the good capability of the proposed method in multi-fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings.