To improve the performance of single-channel, multi-fault blind source separation (BSS), a novel method based on regenerated phase-shifted sinusoid-assisted empirical mode decomposition (RPSEMD) is proposed in this paper. The RPSEMD method is used to decompose the original single-channel vibration signal into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), with the obtained IMFs and original signal together forming a new observed signal for the dimensional lifting. Therefore, an undetermined problem is transformed into a positive definite problem. Compared with the existing EMD method and its improved version, the proposed RPSEMD method performs better in solving the mode mixing problem (MMP) by employing sinusoid-assisted technology. Meanwhile, it can also reduce the computational load and reconstruction errors. The number of source signals is estimated by adopting singular value decomposition (SVD) and Bayes information criterion (BIC). Simulation analysis has demonstrated the superiority of this method being applied in multi-fault BSS. Furthermore, its effectiveness in identifying the multi-fault features of rolling-bearing has been also verified based on a test rig.

Convex 1-D first-order total variation (TV) denoising is an effective method for eliminating signal noise, which can be defined as convex optimization consisting of a quadratic data fidelity term and a non-convex regularization term. It not only ensures strict convex for optimization problems, but also improves the sparseness of the total variation term by introducing the non-convex penalty function. The convex 1-D first-order total variation denoising method has greater superiority in recovering signals with flat regions. However, it often produces undesirable staircase artifacts. Moreover, actual denoising efficacy largely depends on the selection of the regularization parameter, which is utilized to adjust the weights between the fidelity term and total variation term. Using this, algorithms based on second-order total variation regularization and regularization parameter optimization selection are proposed in this paper. The parameter selection index is determined by the permutation entropy and cross-correlation coefficient to avoid the interference by human experience. This yields the convex 1-D second-order total variation denoising method based on the non-convex framework. Comparing with traditional wavelet denoising and first-order total variation denoising, the validity of the proposed method is verified by analyzing the numerical simulation signal and the vibration signal of fault bearing in practice.

In this paper, a novel multi-channel mechanical failure signal classification method based on augmented quaternion singular spectrum analysis (AQSSA) is proposed. Quaternion is used to couple four channels signal, and the quaternion trajectory matrixes can be developed as augmented quaternion matrix by using the feature of the quaternion. The singular value sequence including characteristic information can be extracted by quaternion singular value decomposition (QSVD) of the augmented trajectory matrix using its covariance matrix. The method of traditional singular spectrum analysis (SSA) can only analyze the single channel signal, however, AQSSA can fully use the correlation of multi-channel and reduce the loss of the effective information. Additionally, the main singular values are defined by some methods such as difference spectrum aimed, which has the limitation that major singular values can’t be obtained under the high background noise. Thus, a concept of partial mean of singular value sequence is proposed, and it can be set as the standard of evaluating the trend of singular value sequence. In order to testify the performance of the proposed method, the numerical simulation signal and the fault vibration signal of bearing are simultaneously adopted to verify its effectiveness. The results indicate that the effectiveness of mechanical fault classification by the proposed method is superior to the traditional SSA method and the method of permutation entropy.

As a novel time-frequency analysis method, adaptive local iterative filtering (ALIF) can decompose the time series into several stable components which contain the main fault information. In addition, the amplitude of singular value obtained by singular value decomposition (SVD) can reflect the energy distribution. Naturally, there are certain differences in the energy produced by different faults such as the broken tooth, wearing and normal. Thus, a novel method of mechanical fault classification method based on adaptive local iterative filtering and singular value decomposition is proposed in this paper. Firstly, ALIF method decomposed the original vibration signal into a number of stable components to establish an initial feature vector matrix. Then, the singular values energy corresponding to the feature matrix is employed as a criterion to identify various faults. Compared with the conventional EMD method by simulation experiments, ALIF method has obvious superiority in solving modal aliasing, which is more conducive to the advanced analysis. In this paper, the proposed method is employed to extract the fault information of rolling bearing fault signals from Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center. To further verify the effectiveness of the method, the case study is conducted at Drivetrain Diagnostics Simulator. To further illustrate the effectiveness of the method, the results obtained by this method are compared with EMD and EEMD. The results indicated the proposed method performs better in the classification of different mechanical faulty modes.