A fault diagnosis approach for roller bearing based on IMF envelope spectrum and SVM

Targeting the modulation characteristics of roller bearing fault vibration signals, a method of fault feature extraction based on intrinsic mode function (IMF) envelope spectrum is proposed to overcome the limitations of conventional envelope analysis method. By utilizing the proposed feature extraction method, the disadvantages of conventional envelope analysis method such as the chosen of central frequency of filter with experience in advance, looking for spectral line of fault characteristic frequencies in envelope spectrum and so on could be overcome. Firstly, the original modulation signals are decomposed into a number of IMFs by empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method. Secondly, the ratios of amplitudes at the different fault characteristic frequencies in the envelope spectra of some IMFs that include dominant fault information are defined as the characteristic amplitude ratios. Finally, the characteristic amplitude ratios serve as the fault characteristic vectors to be input to the support vector machine (SVM) classifiers and the work condition and fault patterns of the roller bearings are identified. Since the recognition results are available directly from the output of the SVM classifiers, the proposed diagnosis method provides the possibility to fulfill the automatic recognition to machinery faults.