Fault diagnosis of ball bearings using continuous wavelet transform

Bearing failure is one of the foremost causes of breakdown in rotating machines, resulting in costly systems downtime. This paper presents a methodology for rolling element bearings fault diagnosis using continuous wavelet transform (CWT). The fault diagnosis method consists of three steps, firstly the six different base wavelets are considered in which three are from real valued and other three from complex valued. Out of these six wavelets, the base wavelet is selected based on wavelet selection criterion to extract statistical features from wavelet coefficients of raw vibration signals. Two wavelet selection criteria Maximum Energy to Shannon Entropy ratio and Maximum Relative Wavelet Energy are used and compared to select an appropriate wavelet for feature extraction. Finally, the bearing faults are classified using these statistical features as input to machine learning techniques. Three machine learning techniques are used for faults classifications, out of which two are supervised machine learning techniques, i.e. support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN) and other one is an unsupervised machine learning technique, i.e. self-organizing maps (SOM). The methodology presented in the paper is applied to the rolling element bearings fault diagnosis. The Meyer wavelet is selected based on Maximum Energy to Shannon Entropy ratio and the Complex Morlet wavelet is selected using Maximum Relative Wavelet Energy criterion. The test result showed that the SVM identified the fault categories of rolling element bearing more accurately for both Meyer wavelet and Complex Morlet wavelet and has a better diagnosis performance as compared to the ANN and SOM. Features selected using Meyer wavelet gives higher faults classification efficiency with SVM classifier. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.