Health monitoring of cooling fan bearings based on wavelet filter

In this paper, a vibration-based health monitoring approach for cooling fans is proposed using a wavelet filter for early detection of faults in fan bearings and for the assessment of fault severity. To match the wavelet filter to the fault characteristic signal, a fuzzy rule is introduced to maximize the amplitudes of bearing characteristic frequencies (BCFs), which are an indicator of bearing faults. The sum of the amplitudes of BCFs and their harmonics (SABCF) is used as an index to capture the bearing degradation trend. A comparative study is conducted with commonly used time-domain indices in the degradation assessment, and performance is quantified by three measures, i.e., monotonicity, prognosability, and trendability. The analysis results of the experimental data show that the proposed method can effectively detect incipient defects and can better capture the degradation trend of fan bearings than traditional time-domain indices in vibration analysis. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.