In the case of fault diagnosis for roller bearings, the conventional diagnosis approaches by using the time interval of energy impacts in time-frequency distribution or the pass-frequencies are based on the assumption that machinery operates under a constant rotational speed. However, when the rotational speed varies in the broader range, the pass-frequencies vary with the change of rotational speed and bearing faults cannot be identified by the interval of impacts. Researches related to automatic diagnosis for rotational machinery in variable operating conditions were quite few. A novel automatic feature extraction method is proposed based on a pseudo-Wigner-Ville distribution （PWVD） and an extraction of symptom parameter （SP）. An extraction method for instantaneous feature spectrum is presented using the relative crossing information （RCI） and sequential inference approach, by which the feature spectrum from time-frequency distribution can be automatically, sequentially extracted. The SPs are considered in the frequency domain using the extracted feature spectrum to identify among the conditions of a machine. A method to obtain the synthetic symptom parameter is also proposed by the least squares mapping （LSM） technique for increasing the diagnosis sensitivity of SP. Practical examples of diagnosis for bearings are given in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The verification results show that the features of bearing faults, such as the outer-race, inner-race and roller element defects have been effectively extracted, and the proposed method can be used for condition diagnosis of a machine under the variable rotational speed.
The condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings are particularly crucial in rotating mechanical applications in industry. A bearing fault signal contains information not only about fault condition and fault type but also the severity of the fault. This means fault severity quantitative analysis is one of most active and valid ways to realize proper maintenance decision. Aiming at the deficiency of the research in bearing single point pitting fault quantitative diagnosis, a new back-propagation neural network method based on wavelet packet decomposition coefficient entropy is proposed. The three levels of wavelet packet coefficient entropy（WPCE） is introduced as a characteristic input vector to the BPNN. Compared with the wavelet packet decomposition energy ratio input vector, WPCE shows more sensitive in distinguishing from the different fault severity degree of the measured signal. The engineering application results show that the quantitative trend fault diagnosis is realized in the different fault degree of the single point bearing pitting fault. The breakthrough attempt from quantitative to qualitative on the pattern recognition of rolling element bearings fault diagnosis is realized.
