As train loads and travel speeds have increased over time, railway axle bearings have become critical elements which require more efficient non-destructive inspection and fault diagnostics methods. This paper presents a novel and adaptive procedure based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and Hilbert marginal spectrum for multi-fault diagnostics of axle bearings. EEMD overcomes the limitations that often hypothesize about data and computational efforts that restrict the application of signal processing techniques. The outputs of this adaptive approach are the intrinsic mode functions that are treated with the Hilbert transform in order to obtain the Hilbert instantaneous frequency spectrum and marginal spectrum. Anyhow, not all the IMFs obtained by the decomposition should be considered into Hilbert marginal spectrum. The IMFs’ confidence index arithmetic proposed in this paper is fully autonomous, overcoming the major limit of selection by user with experience, and allows the development of on-line tools. The effectiveness of the improvement is proven by the successful diagnosis of an axle bearing with a single fault or multiple composite faults, e.g., outer ring fault, cage fault and pin roller fault.

Railway axle bearings are one of the most important components used in vehicles and their failures probably result in unexpected accidents and economic losses. To realize a condition monitoring and fault diagnosis scheme of railway axle bearings, three dimensionless steadiness indexes in a time domain, a frequency domain, and a shape domain are respectively proposed to measure the steady states of bearing vibration signals. Firstly, vibration data collected from some designed experiments are pre-processed by using ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD). Then, the coefficient of variation is introduced to construct two steady-state indexes from pre-processed vibration data in a time domain and a frequency domain, respectively. A shape function is used to construct a steady-state index in a shape domain. At last, to distinguish normal and abnormal bearing health states, some guideline thresholds are proposed. Further, to identify axle bearings with outer race defects, a pin roller defect, a cage defect, and coupling defects, the boundaries of all steadiness indexes are experimentally established. Experimental results showed that the proposed condition monitoring and fault diagnosis scheme is effective in identifying different bearing health conditions.

Since minimum correlated generalized Lp/Lq deconvolution (MCG-Lp/Lq-D) cannot simultaneously have a good sensing ability to repetitive fault impulses and a strong robustness to noise when processing low SNR signals, a new deconvolution method, minimum improved correlated generalized Lp/Lq deconvolution (MICG-Lp/Lq-D), is proposed in this article. The proposed method is designed based on a novel norm, the improved correlated generalized Lp/Lq (ICG-Lp/Lq) norm. The ICG-Lp/Lq norm not only has the low-order statistics form that is similar to the correlated generalized Lp/Lq (CG-Lp/Lq) norm used in MCG-Lp/Lq-D, but also has the high shift-order signal correlation construction similar to the correlated kurtosis (CK) norm used in maximum correlated kurtosis deconvolution (MCKD). This guarantees that the proposed norm is robust enough to strong noise and can improve its sensing ability for repetitive impulses simultaneously. This feature of the ICG-Lp/Lq norm ensures that MICG-Lp/Lq-D can suppress outliers and extract weak impacts when processing low SNR signals. Simulated and experimental case studies verify the performance of the proposed method. The results indicate that the proposed method is robust enough to strong noise and very sensitive to repetitive impulses simultaneously, which indeed overcomes the aforementioned defects of MCG-Lp/Lq-D. Therefore, MICG-Lp/Lq-D can be considered a promising tool for detecting repetitive impulses.