The weak fault feature extraction is key to early fault diagnosis of rotary machinery. However, the existing sparse low-rank fault feature extraction methods have the deficiency of underestimation and low peak signal-to-noise ratio. To solve these problems, this article presents an enhanced sparse low-rank (ESL) representation approach for weak fault feature extraction. Considering the periodic self-similarity and shift invariance of fault feature, a weighted dual approximation regularization is proposed for noise and fault irrelevant harmonic suppression, which provides a cornerstone for rotating machinery weak fault feature extraction. To be specific, the truncated nuclear norm (TNN) and weighted generalized minimax-concave (WGMC) penalty are leveraged to form the weighted dual approximation regularization so that it can inherit their superior properties. The TNN can capture the periodic self-similarity and shift-invariance structure of fault impulses while restraining the noise; the WGMC penalty can enhance the sparsity, restrain the fault irrelevant harmonics, and overcome the deficiency of underestimating the large amplitude components. Therefore, the proposed model can effectively extract the weak fault feature. The proposed approach is applied to bearing and planet gear fault diagnosis to evaluate its effectiveness. Comparison results show the significant improvements of the proposed ESL method, indicating that it has great potentials in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery.

A novel direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method is proposed based on the sparse cumulants fitting without redundancy. Firstly, we derive that some fourth order cumulants of the array output are redundant and therefore are removed to reduce computational complexity. Then, the left cumulants are sparsely represented on an overcomplete basis and the DOAs are resolved by using a software package. Despite introducing a high variance, the proposed method shows several advantages including the ability to detect more sources than sensors, high resolution, and robustness to all kinds of Gaussian noise. Besides, our method does not have to know, a priori, the number of sources. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.