Classification of journal bearing friction states based on acoustic emission signals

For diagnosis and predictive maintenance of mechatronic systems, monitoring of bearings is essential. An important building block for this is the determination of the bearing friction condition. This paper deals with the possibility of monitoring different journal bearing friction states, such as mixed and fluid friction, and examines a new approach to distinguish between different friction intensities under several speed and load combinations based on feature extraction and feature selection methods applied on acoustic emission (AE) signals. The aim of this work is to identify separation effective features of AE signals to subsequently classify the journal bearing friction states. Furthermore, the acquired features give information about the mixed friction intensity, which is significant for remaining useful lifetime (RUL) prediction. Time domain features as well as features in the frequency domain have been investigated in this work. To increase the sensitivity of the extracted features the AE signals were transformed to the frequency-time-domain using continuous wavelet transform (CWT). Significant frequency bands are determined to separate different friction states more effective. A support vector machine (SVM) is used to classify the signals into three different friction classes. In the end the idea for an RUL prediction method by using the already determined information is given and explained.