A novel intelligent fault diagnosis method for motor roller bearings which operate under unsteady rotating speed and load is proposed in this paper. The pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (PWVD) and the relative crossing information (RCI) methods are used for extracting the feature spectra from the non-stationary vibration signal measured for condition diagnosis. The RCI is used to automatically extract the feature spectrum from the time-frequency distribution of the vibration signal. The extracted feature spectrum is instantaneous, and not correlated with the rotation speed and load. By using the ant colony optimization (ACO) clustering algorithm, the synthesizing symptom parameters (SSP) for condition diagnosis are obtained. The experimental results shows that the diagnostic sensitivity of the SSP is higher than original symptom parameter (SP), and the SSP can sensitively reflect the characteristics of the feature spectrum for precise condition diagnosis. Finally, a fuzzy diagnosis method based on sequential inference and possibility theory is also proposed, by which the conditions of the machine can be identified sequentially as well.

This paper proposes a new signal feature extraction and fault diagnosis method for fault diagnosis of low-speed machinery. Statistic filter (SF) and wavelet package transform (WPT) are combined with moving-peak-hold method (M-PH) to extract features of a fault signal, and special bearing diagnostic symptom parameters (SSPs) in a frequency domain that are sensitive to bearing fault diagnosis are defined to recognize fault types. The SF is first used to adaptively cancel noises, and then fault detection is performed by exploiting the optimum symptom parameters in a time domain to identify a normal or fault state. For precise diagnosis, the SSPs are calculated after the signals are processed by M-PH and WPT. A decision tree is used to structure intelligent diagnosis rules in each step until the states are fully and automatically detected. The efficacy of this method was confirmed by applying it to an experimental low-speed rotation machine.

A step-by-step fuzzy diagnostic method based on frequency domain symptom extraction and trivalent logic fuzzy diagnosis theory (TLFD), which is established by combining the trivalent logic inference theory with the possibility and fuzzy theories, is proposed herein. The features for diagnosing a number of abnormal states are extracted sequentially from the measured signals using statistical tests in the frequency domain. The symptom parameters (SPs) that can sensitively reflect the symptoms of the abnormal states are then selected to provide effective information for the discrimination of each state, and the membership function of each state is generated based on the possibility theory using the probability functions of the SPs. The step-by-step fuzzy diagnoses are performed based on the TLFD. This method can be extensively used to diagnose anomalies in various equipment. In this study, the diagnosis of structure faults of a rotating machine is cited as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of this method.

Rolling bearings are key components of rotary machines. To ensure early effective fault diagnosis for bearings, a new rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and an improved kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) is proposed in this paper. A fault signal is decomposed via VMD to obtain the intrinsic mode function (IMF) components, and the approximate entropy (ApEn) of the IMF component containing the main fault information is calculated. An eigenvector is created from the approximate entropy of each component. A bearing diagnosis model is created via a KELM; the KELM parameters are optimized using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to obtain a KELM diagnosis model with optimal parameters. Finally, the effectiveness of the diagnosis method proposed in this paper is verified via a fan bearing fault diagnosis test. Under identical conditions, the result is compared with the results obtained using a back propagation (BP) neural network, a conventional extreme learning machine (ELM), and a support vector machine (SVM). The test result shows that the method proposed in this paper is superior to the other three methods in terms of diagnostic accuracy.