Due to the non-stationary characteristics of vibration signals acquired from rolling element bearing fault, the time-frequency analysis is often applied to describe the local information of these unstable signals smartly. However, it is difficult to classify the high dimensional feature matrix directly because of too large dimensions for many classifiers. This paper combines the concepts of time-frequency distribution(TFD) with non-negative matrix factorization(NMF), and proposes a novel TFD matrix factorization method to enhance representation and identification of bearing fault. Throughout this method, the TFD of a vibration signal is firstly accomplished to describe the localized faults with short-time Fourier transform(STFT). Then, the supervised NMF mapping is adopted to extract the fault features from TFD. Meanwhile, the fault samples can be clustered and recognized automatically by using the clustering property of NMF. The proposed method takes advantages of the NMF in the parts-based representation and the adaptive clustering. The localized fault features of interest can be extracted as well. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the 9 kinds of the bearing fault on a test bench is performed. The proposed method can effectively identify the fault severity and different fault types. Moreover, in comparison with the artificial neural network(ANN), NMF yields 99.3% mean accuracy which is much superior to ANN. This research presents a simple and practical resolution for the fault diagnosis problem of rolling element bearing in high dimensional feature space.

For decades, bearing factory quality evaluation has been a key problem and the methods used are always static tests. This paper investigates the use of piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers (PUT) as dynamic diagnostic tools and a relevant signal classification technique, wavelet packet entropy (WPEntropy) flow manifold learning, for the evaluation of bearing factory quality. The data were analyzed using wavelet packet entropy (WPEntropy) flow manifold learning. The results showed that the ultrasonic technique with WPEntropy flow manifold learning was able to detect different types of defects on the bearing components. The test method and the proposed technique are described and the different signals are analyzed and discussed.

The feature space extracted from vibration signals with various faults is often nonlinear and of high dimension. Currently, nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods are available for extracting low-dimensional embeddings, such as manifold learning. However, these methods are all based on manual intervention, which have some shortages in stability, and suppressing the disturbance noise. To extract features automatically, a manifold learning method with self-organization mapping is introduced for the first time. Under the non-uniform sample distribution reconstructed by the phase space, the expectation maximization(EM) iteration algorithm is used to divide the local neighborhoods adaptively without manual intervention. After that, the local tangent space alignment(LTSA) algorithm is adopted to compress the high-dimensional phase space into a more truthful low-dimensional representation. Finally, the signal is reconstructed by the kernel regression. Several typical states include the Lorenz system, engine fault with piston pin defect, and bearing fault with outer-race defect are analyzed. Compared with the LTSA and continuous wavelet transform, the results show that the background noise can be fully restrained and the entire periodic repetition of impact components is well separated and identified. A new way to automatically and precisely extract the impulsive components from mechanical signals is proposed.