Weak Fault Feature Identification for Rolling Bearing Based on EMD and Spectral Kurtosis Method

The key to the fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is to extract the fault characteristics from the vibration signal of rotating machinery. Signal analysis and processing are the most commonly used methods for feature extraction. In this paper, a method combining the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and spectral kurtosis is presented for fault detection of rotating machinery based on vibrational signal. According to the modulation characteristic of the rolling element bearing fault signal and the disadvantage of depending on the experience to select resonance high frequency band, an improved method integrating EMD with spectrum kurtosis for rolling bearing fault diagnosis is put forward. Firstly, the bearing fault signal is decomposed into a series of intrinsic mode function (IMF) through EMD method. Secondly, the false IMF components are eliminated through mutual information, kurtosis and cross-correlation, then the useful IMFs are selected to construct the fault signal. Finally, by designing the optimal band pass filter with the spectral kurtosis, it can be obtained that, the envelope demodulation spectrum of the filtered signal, and the fault feature of rolling bearing are extracted. The experimental result of the rolling bearing fault diagnosis shows that the proposed method can effectively extract the weak fault feature of rolling bearing, which is superior to envelope analysis.