Early fault detection method for rolling bearing based on multiscale morphological filtering of information-entropy threshold

The scale of structure element is especially important to obtain good filtering results in multiscale morphological filtering (MMF) method. In general, the optimal scale of structure element is set to be a fixed value in traditional morphological filter, therefore it is difficult to extract the fault feature from rolling bearing vibration signal effectively. A novel multiscale morphological filtering algorithm is proposed based on information-entropy threshold (IET-MMF) for early fault detection of rolling bearing. Compared with traditional MMF method, several optimal scales of structure elements are achieved according to the energy distribution characteristic of different vibration signals. The information entropy theory is applied to quantify the analyzed signals, and the optimal threshold of information entropy is obtained by iterative algorithm to ensure integrity of useful information. The simulation and rolling bearing experimental analysis results show that the IET-MMF method can extract fault features of vibration signals effectively.