A fault diagnosis scheme of rolling element bearing based on near-field acoustic holography and gray level co-occurrence matrix

Vibration signal analysis is the most widely used technique in condition monitoring or fault diagnosis, whereas in some cases vibration-based diagnosis is restrained because of its contact measurement. Acoustic-based diagnosis (ABD) with non-contact measurement has received little attention, although sound field may contain abundant information related to fault pattern. A new scheme of ABD for rolling element bearing fault diagnosis based on near-field acoustic holography (NAH) and gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) is presented in this paper. It focuses on applying the distribution information of sound field to bearing fault diagnosis. A series of rolling element bearings with different types of fault are experimentally studied. Sound fields and corresponding acoustic images in different bearing conditions are obtained by fast Fourier transform (FFT) based NAH. GLCM features are extracted for capturing fault pattern information underlying sound fields. The optimal feature subset selected by improved F-score is fed into multi-class support vector machine (SVM) for fault pattern identification. The feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed scheme is demonstrated on the good experimental results and the comparison with the traditional ABD method. Considering test cost, the quantized level and the number of GLCM features for each characteristic frequency is suggested to be 4 and 32, respectively, with the satisfactory accuracy rate 97.5%.

► We propose a fault diagnosis scheme for rolling bearing based on near-field acoustic holography.
► GLCM features can effectively capture spatial fault-related information in acoustic images.
► The effectiveness of our proposed scheme is demonstrated on the good experimental results.
► The choice of key parameters is suggested for low test cost and nice accuracy.