Feature extraction is one of the most important, pivotal, and difficult problems in mechanical fault diagnosis, which directly relates to the accuracy of fault diagnosis and the reliability of early fault prediction. Therefore, a new fault feature extraction method, called the EDOMFE method based on integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), mode selection, and multi-scale fuzzy entropy is proposed to accurately diagnose fault in this paper. The EEMD method is used to decompose the vibration signal into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with a different physical significance. The correlation coefficient analysis method is used to calculate and determine three improved IMFs, which are close to the original signal. The multi-scale fuzzy entropy with the ability of effective distinguishing the complexity of different signals is used to calculate the entropy values of the selected three IMFs in order to form a feature vector with the complexity measure, which is regarded as the inputs of the support vector machine (SVM) model for training and constructing a SVM classifier (EOMSMFD based on EDOMFE and SVM) for fulfilling fault pattern recognition. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by real bearing vibration signals of the motor with different loads and fault severities. The experiment results show that the proposed EDOMFE method can effectively extract fault features from the vibration signal and that the proposed EOMSMFD method can accurately diagnose the fault types and fault severities for the inner race fault, the outer race fault, and rolling element fault of the motor bearing. Therefore, the proposed method provides a new fault diagnosis technology for rotating machinery.

A motor bearing system is a nonlinear dynamics system with nonlinear support stiffness. It is an asymmetry system, which plays an extremely important role in rotating machinery. In this paper, a center frequency method of double thresholds is proposed to improve the variational mode decomposition (VMD) method, then an adaptive VMD (called DTCFVMD) method is obtained to extract the fault feature. In the DTCFVMD method, a center frequency method of double thresholds is a symmetry method, which is used to determine the decomposed mode number of VMD according to the power spectrum of the signal. The proposed DTCFVMD method is used to decompose the nonlinear and non-stationary vibration signals of motor bearing in order to obtain a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) under different scales. Then, the Hilbert transform is used to analyze the envelope of each mode component and calculate the power spectrum of each mode component. Finally, the power spectrum is used to extract the fault feature frequency for determining the fault type of the motor bearing. To test and verify the effectiveness of the DTCFVMD method, the actual fault vibration signal of the motor bearing is selected in here. The experimental results show that the center frequency method of double thresholds can effectively determine the mode number of the VMD method, and the proposed DTCFVMD method can accurately extract the clear time frequency characteristics of each mode component, and obtain the fault characteristics of characteristics; frequency, rotating frequency, and frequency doubling and so on.