Quantitative diagnosis of a spall-like fault of a rolling element bearing by empirical mode decomposition and the approximate entropy method

Spalling or pitting is the main manifestation of fault development in a bearing during the earlier stages. Previous studies indicated that the vibration signal of a bearing with a spall-like defect may be composed of two parts; the first part originates from the entry of the rolling element into the spall-like area, and the second part refers to the exit from the fault region. The quantitative diagnosis of a spall-like fault of the rolling element bearing can be realised if the entry-exit event times can be accurately calculated. However, the vibration signal of a faulty bearing is usually non-stationary and non-linear with strong background noise interference. Meanwhile, the signal energy from the early spall region is too low to accurately register the features of the entry-exit event in the time domain. In this work, the approximate entropy (ApEn) method and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) are applied to clearly separate the entry-exit events, and thus the size of the spall-like fault is estimated. First, the original acceleration vibration signal is decomposed by EMD, and some useful intrinsic mode function (IMF) components are obtained. Second, the concept of IMF-ApEn is introduced, which can directly reflect the complexity of the IMFs using the actual vibration signal. The IMF-ApEn distributions of different noise signals illustrate that the process of complexity changes when a full spectrum process is split into its IMFs. Third, a unit white noise IMF-ApEn distribution template serves as a sieve to extract the (effective intrinsic mode functions) EIMF components, and thus the entry and exit events in the response signal are distinguished. The IMF-ApEn method is further compared with a previous method (N. Sawalhi's method) to test its superiority. The dynamic effects are investigated when the ball element enters a spall-like region by computer simulation. The simulation and the experimental results show that the approach to the quantitative diagnosis of a rolling element bearing based on IMF-ApEn has higher veracity and good robustness. (c) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.