A damage degree identification method based on high-order difference mathematical morphology gradient spectrum entropy (HMGSEDI) is proposed in this paper to solve the problem that fault signal of rolling bearings are weak and difficult to be quantitatively measured. In the HMGSEDI method, on the basis of mathematical morphology gradient spectrum and spectrum entropy, the changing scale influence of structure elements to damage degree identification is thoroughly analyzed to determine its optimal scale range. The high-order difference mathematical morphology gradient spectrum entropy is then defined in order to quantitatively describe the fault damage degree of bearing. The discrimination concept of fault damage degree is defined to quantitatively describe the difference between the high-order differential mathematical entropy and the general mathematical morphology entropy in order to propose a fault damage degree identification method. The vibration signal of motors under no-load and load states are used to testify the effectiveness of the proposed HMGSEDI method. The experiment shows that high-order differential mathematical morphology entropy can more effectively identify the fault damage degree of bearings and the identification accuracy of fault damage degree can be greatly improved. Therefore, the HMGSEDI method is an effective quantitative fault damage degree identification method, and provides a new way to identify fault damage degree and fault prediction of rotating machinery.

The variational mode decomposition (VMD) method for signal decomposition is severely affected by the number of components of the VMD method. In order to determine the decomposition modal number, K, in the VMD method, a new center frequency method of the multi-threshold is proposed in this paper. Then, an improved VMD (MTCFVMD) algorithm based on the center frequency method of the multi-threshold is obtained to decompose the vibration signal into a series of intrinsic modal functions (IMFs). The Hilbert transformation is used to calculate the envelope signal of each IMF component, and the maximum frequency value of the power spectral density is obtained in order to effectively and accurately extract the fault characteristic frequency and realize the fault diagnosis. The rolling element vibration data of the motor bearing is used to test the effectiveness of proposed methods. The experiment results show that the center frequency method of the multi-threshold can effectively determine the number, K, of decomposed modes. The proposed fault diagnosis method based on MTCFVMD and Hilbert transformation can effectively and accurately extract the fault characteristic frequency, rotation frequency, and frequency doubling, and can obtain higher diagnostic accuracy.