A fault diagnosis method based on local mean decomposition and multi-scale entropy for roller bearings

•Propose a fault diagnosis method combining the LMD method and multi-scale entropy.•Use LMD method to avoid some limitations existing in other time-frequency methods.•Use MSE to reflect the complexity of vibration signals at multi scales.

A novel fault feature extraction method based on the local mean decomposition technology and multi-scale entropy is proposed in this paper. When fault occurs in roller bearings, the vibration signals picked up would exactly display non-stationary characteristics. It is not easy to make an accurate evaluation on the working condition of the roller bearings only through traditional time-domain methods or frequency-domain methods. Therefore, local mean decomposition method, a new self-adaptive time-frequency method, is used as a pretreatment to decompose the non-stationary vibration signal of a roller bearing into a number of product functions. Furthermore, the multi-scale entropy, referring to the calculation of sample entropy across a sequence of scales, is introduced here. The multi-scale entropy of each product function can be calculated as the feature vectors. The analysis results from practical bearing vibration signals demonstrate that the proposed method is effective.