Feature extraction of rolling bearing’s early weak fault based on EEMD and tunable Q-factor wavelet transform

• The TQWT is used in feature extraction of rolling bearing’s early weak fault.
• The EEMD is used to strengthen the fault feature extraction result of TQWT.
• The accelerated bearing life test is carried out in the paper.
• The advantages of proposed method over other methods are verified.

When early weak fault emerges in rolling bearing the fault feature is too weak to extract using the traditional fault diagnosis methods such as Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and envelope demodulation. The tunable Q-factor wavelet transform (TQWT) is the improvement of traditional one single Q-factor wavelet transform, and it is very fit for separating the low Q-factor transient impact component from the high Q-factor sustained oscillation components when fault emerges in rolling bearing. However, it is hard to extract the rolling bearing’ early weak fault feature perfectly using the TQWT directly. Ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is the improvement of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) which not only has the virtue of self-adaptability of EMD but also overcomes the mode mixing problem of EMD. The original signal of rolling bearing’ early weak fault is decomposed by EEMD and several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) are obtained. Then the IMF with biggest kurtosis index value is selected and handled by the TQWT subsequently. At last, the envelope demodulation method is applied on the low Q-factor transient impact component and satisfactory extraction result is obtained.