Circular domain features based condition monitoring for low speed slewing bearing

•Identify the onset of low speed slewing bearing fault.•Condition monitoring of naturally damage slewing bearing.•Frequency alteration identification of bearing signal using piecewise aggregate approximation (PAA).•Novel application of circular domain features extraction in bearing condition monitoring.

This paper presents a novel application of circular domain features calculation based condition monitoring method for low rotational speed slewing bearing. The method employs data reduction process using piecewise aggregate approximation (PAA) to detect frequency alteration in the bearing signal when the fault occurs. From the processed data, circular domain features such as circular mean, circular variance, circular skewness and circular kurtosis are calculated and monitored. It is shown that the slight changes of bearing condition during operation can be identified more clearly in circular domain analysis compared to time domain analysis and other advanced signal processing methods such as wavelet decomposition and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) allowing the engineer to better schedule the maintenance work. Four circular domain features were shown to consistently and clearly identify the onset (initiation) of fault from the peak feature value which is not clearly observable in time domain features. The application of the method is demonstrated with simulated data, laboratory slewing bearing data and industrial bearing data from Coal Bridge Reclaimer used in a local steel mill.