Rolling Bearing Weak Fault Feature Extraction under Variable Speed Conditions via Joint Sparsity and Low-Rankness in the Cyclic Order-Frequency Domain

Rolling bearings are critical to the normal operation of mechanical systems, which often undergo time-varying working conditions. When the local defects appear on a rolling bearing, the transient impulses will generate and be covered by the strong background noise. Therefore, extracting the rolling bearing weak fault feature with time-varying speed is critical to mechanical system diagnosis. A weak fault feature extraction strategy of rolling bearing under time-varying working conditions is proposed. Firstly, the order-frequency spectral correlation (OFSC) is computed for transferring the measured signal into a higher dimensional space. Then, the joint sparsity and low-rankness constraint is imposed on OFSC to detect the time-varying faulty characteristics. An algorithm in the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework is derived. Finally, the enhanced envelope order spectrum (EEOS) is applied to further detect the defective features, which can make the fault features more obvious. The feasibility of the proposed method is confirmed by simulations and an experimental case.

Automated summary

Rolling bearings are crucial in mechanical systems and extracting weak fault features with time-varying speed is essential for mechanical system diagnosis. This paper proposes a method that computes order-frequency spectral correlation to transform the measured signal and applies joint sparsity and low-rankness constraint to detect time-varying faulty characteristics. An algorithm in the ADMM framework is derived and the enhanced envelope order spectrum is used to further detect defective features.