Fault features extraction for bearing prognostics

Over the past years, investigation on condition-based maintenance (CBM) technique on bearing has been conducted. Bearing diagnostics and prognostics are the important aspects in CBM. A key to the success of using vibration data for bearing fault diagnostics and bearing lifecycle prognostics is a quantified relationship between bearing damage and bearing fault features. To establish such a quantitative relationship, effective signal processing techniques to extract bearing fault features from vibration signals are needed. This paper describes a newly developed fault feature extraction method for bearing prognostics. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated with two real bearing run-to-failure test datasets: one collected under normal operating conditions and another one under abnormal operating conditions. Experimental results show that the bearing fault features extracted using both traditional vibration analysis methods and the proposed method give clear bearing heath degradation trend for the dataset collected under normal operating conditions. However, for the data collected under abnormal operating conditions, bearing fault features obtained using traditional vibration analysis methods fail to show the bearing health degradation trend while the fault features extracted using the proposed method give consistent bearing degradation trends.