A Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Variational Mode Decomposition and an Improved Kernel Extreme Learning Machine

Rolling bearings are key components of rotary machines. To ensure early effective fault diagnosis for bearings, a new rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and an improved kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) is proposed in this paper. A fault signal is decomposed via VMD to obtain the intrinsic mode function (IMF) components, and the approximate entropy (ApEn) of the IMF component containing the main fault information is calculated. An eigenvector is created from the approximate entropy of each component. A bearing diagnosis model is created via a KELM; the KELM parameters are optimized using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to obtain a KELM diagnosis model with optimal parameters. Finally, the effectiveness of the diagnosis method proposed in this paper is verified via a fan bearing fault diagnosis test. Under identical conditions, the result is compared with the results obtained using a back propagation (BP) neural network, a conventional extreme learning machine (ELM), and a support vector machine (SVM). The test result shows that the method proposed in this paper is superior to the other three methods in terms of diagnostic accuracy.