Feature extraction of latent fault components of rolling bearing based on self-learned sparse atomics and frequency band entropy

As the key rotating parts in machinery, it is crucial to extract the latent fault features of rolling bearing in machinery condition monitoring to avoid the occurrence of sudden accidents. Unfortunately, the latent fault features are hard to extract by using the traditional signal processing method such as envelope demodulation because the effect of envelope demodulation is influenced strongly by the degree of background noise. Sparse decomposition, as a new promising method being able of capturing the latent fault feature components buried in the vibration signal, has attracted a lot of attentions, especially the predefined dictionary-based sparse decomposition methods. However, the feature extraction effect of the predefined dictionary-based sparse decomposition depends on whether the prior knowledge of the analyzed signal is sufficient or not. To overcome the above problems, a feature extraction method of latent fault components of rolling bearing based on self-learned sparse atomics and frequency band entropy is proposed in the article. First, a self-learned sparse atomics method is applied on the early weak vibration signal of rolling bearing and several self-learned atomics are obtained. Then, the self-learned atomics owing bigger kurtosis values are selected and used to reconstruct the vibration signal to remove the other interference signals. Subsequently, the frequency band entropy method is used to analyze the reconstructed vibration signal, and the optimal parameter of band-pass filter could be calculated. At last, the reconstructed vibration signal is filtered using the optimal band-pass filter, envelope demodulation on the filtered signal is applied, and better fault feature is extracted. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified through the vibration data of the accelerated fatigue life test of rolling bearing. Besides, the analysis results of the same vibration data using Autogram and spectral kurtosis methods are also presented to highlight the superiority of the proposed method.