Bearing performance degradation assessment based on lifting wavelet packet decomposition and fuzzy c-means

Bearing performance degradation assessment is crucial to realize condition-based maintenance. In this paper, a new method for it is proposed based on lifting wavelet packet decomposition and fuzzy c-means. Feature vectors are composed of the node energies of lifting wavelet packet decomposition. Normal and final failure data are used as training samples to build assessment model utilizing fuzzy c-means, and the subjection of tested data to normal state is defined as the degradation indicator, which has intuitionistics explanation related to degradation degree. Results of its application to accelerated bearing life test show that this indicator can reflect effectively performance degradation of bearing. And after discussing the influence of outliers in training set, a robust strategy is proposed.