Enhanced detection of rolling element bearing fault based on stochastic resonance

Early bearing faults can generate a series of weak impacts. All the influence factors in measurement may degrade the vibration signal. Currently, bearing fault enhanced detection method based on stochastic resonance(SR) is implemented by expensive computation and demands high sampling rate, which requires high quality software and hardware for fault diagnosis. In order to extract bearing characteristic frequencies component, SR normalized scale transform procedures are presented and a circuit module is designed based on parameter-tuning bistable SR. In the simulation test, discrete and analog sinusoidal signals under heavy noise are enhanced by SR normalized scale transform and circuit module respectively. Two bearing fault enhanced detection strategies are proposed. One is realized by pure computation with normalized scale transform for sampled vibration signal, and the other is carried out by designed SR hardware with circuit module for analog vibration signal directly. The first strategy is flexible for discrete signal processing, and the second strategy demands much lower sampling frequency and less computational cost. The application results of the two strategies on bearing inner race fault detection of a test rig show that the local signal to noise ratio of the characteristic components obtained by the proposed methods are enhanced by about 50% compared with the band pass envelope analysis for the bearing with weaker fault. In addition, helicopter transmission bearing fault detection validates the effectiveness of the enhanced detection strategy with hardware. The combination of SR normalized scale transform and circuit module can meet the need of different application fields or conditions, thus providing a practical scheme for enhanced detection of bearing fault.