Multi-Fault Diagnosis of Ball Bearings Using Appropriate IMFs for Envelope Analysis

The traditional envelope analysis is the presence of an effective method for the rolling bearing fault detection. However, all of the resonant frequency bands must be examined on the process of bearing fault detection. To ameliorate the deficiency, this paper presents a novel concept based on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the envelope analysis to choose an appropriate the resonant frequency bands. By virtue of the band-pass property of EMD, the resonant frequency bands will be allocated in the intrinsic mode function (IMF). Moreover, the rolling elements of bearing strike a local fault on the dual faults and the triple faults will be used to validate the capabilities of the proposed method and comparison studies with the traditional envelope analysis will be discussed. The experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently and correctly diagnose the bearing multi-fault types.