Fault diagnosis of rotating machinery with a novel statistical feature extraction and evaluation method

• Statistical features approximating normal distributions are extracted.
• Performance of ANN and SVM based fault classifiers is significantly improved.
• Statistical features are evaluated for fault classification with simple algebraic computations.
• Accuracy of fault classification is analytically guaranteed.

Fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is receiving more and more attentions. Vibration signals of rotating machinery are commonly analyzed to extract features of faults, and the features are identified with classifiers, e.g. artificial neural networks (ANNs) and support vector machines (SVMs). Due to nonlinear behaviors and unknown noises in machinery, the extracted features are varying from sample to sample, which may result in false classifications. It is also difficult to analytically ensure the accuracy of fault diagnosis. In this paper, a feature extraction and evaluation method is proposed for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. Based on the central limit theory, an extraction procedure is given to obtain the statistical features with the help of existing signal processing tools. The obtained statistical features approximately obey normal distributions. They can significantly improve the performance of fault classification, and it is verified by taking ANN and SVM classifiers as examples. Then the statistical features are evaluated with a decoupling technique and compared with thresholds to make the decision on fault classification. The proposed evaluation method only requires simple algebraic computation, and the accuracy of fault classification can be analytically guaranteed in terms of the so-called false classification rate (FCR). An experiment is carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, where the unbalanced fault of rotor, inner race fault, outer race fault and ball fault of bearings are considered.