Vibration analysis is an effective tool for the condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings. Conventional diagnostic methods are based on the stationary assumption, thus they are not applicable to the diagnosis of bearings working under varying speed. This constraint limits the bearing diagnosis to the industrial application significantly. In order to extend the conventional diagnostic methods to speed variation cases, a tacholess envelope order analysis technique is proposed in this paper. In the proposed technique, a tacholess order tracking (TLOT) method is first introduced to extract the tachometer information from the vibration signal itself. On this basis, an envelope order spectrum (EOS) is utilized to recover the bearing characteristic frequencies in the order domain. By combining the advantages of TLOT and EOS, the proposed technique is capable of detecting bearing faults under varying speeds, even without the use of a tachometer. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by both simulated signals and real vibration signals collected from locomotive roller bearings with faults on inner race, outer race and rollers, respectively. Analyzed results show that the proposed method could identify different bearing faults effectively and accurately under speed varying conditions.

De-noising and enhancement of the weak fault signature from the noisy signal are crucial for fault diagnosis, as features are often very weak and masked by the background noise. Deconvolution methods have a significant advantage in counteracting the influence of the transmission path and enhancing the fault impulses. However, the performance of traditional deconvolution methods is greatly affected by some limitations, which restrict the application range. Therefore, this paper proposes a new deconvolution method, named sparse maximum harmonics-noise-ratio deconvolution (SMHD), that employs a novel index, the harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), to be the objective function for iteratively choosing the optimum filter coefficients to maximize HNR. SMHD is designed to enhance latent periodic impulse faults from heavy noise signals by calculating the HNR to estimate the period. A sparse factor is utilized to further suppress the noise and improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the filtered signal in every iteration step. In addition, the updating process of the sparse threshold value and the period guarantees the robustness of SMHD. On this basis, the new method not only overcomes the limitations associated with traditional deconvolution methods, minimum entropy deconvolution (MED) and maximum correlated kurtosis deconvolution (MCKD), but visual inspection is also better, even if the fault period is not provided in advance. Moreover, the efficiency of the proposed method is verified by simulations and bearing data from different test rigs. The results show that the proposed method is effective in the detection of various bearing faults compared with the original MED and MCKD.

When operating under harsh condition (e.g., time-varying speed and load, large shocks), the vibration signals of rolling element bearings are always manifested as low signal noise ratio, non-stationary statistical parameters, which cause difficulties for current diagnostic methods. As such, an IMF-based adaptive envelope order analysis (IMF-AEOA) is proposed for bearing fault detection under such conditions. This approach is established through combining the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), envelope order tracking and fault sensitive analysis. In this scheme, EEMD provides an effective way to adaptively decompose the raw vibration signal into IMFs with different frequency bands. The envelope order tracking is further employed to transform the envelope of each IMF to angular domain to eliminate the spectral smearing induced by speed variation, which makes the bearing characteristic frequencies more clear and discernible in the envelope order spectrum. Finally, a fault sensitive matrix is established to select the optimal IMF containing the richest diagnostic information for final decision making. The effectiveness of IMF-AEOA is validated by simulated signal and experimental data from locomotive bearings. The result shows that IMF-AEOA could accurately identify both single and multiple faults of bearing even under time-varying rotating speed and large extraneous shocks.