Rolling element bearing fault diagnosis under time-varying speed conditions based on improved wavelet packet transform and envelope order tracking

Abstract Rolling element bearings (REBs) are crucial components of rotating machinery and play an important role in industrial production. Failure of REBs can lead to significant economic losses and catastrophic accidents. In order to ensure their safe and stable operation, we propose a novel approach called EOT-IWPT which combines the envelope order tracking (EOT) with an improved wavelet packet transform algorithm (IWPT) for diagnosing failures in REBs under time-varying speed conditions. First, the time- domain vibration signal is resampled at constant angle intervels according to the phase of the rotating shaft to obtain the angle-domian signal. Next, the resampled signal is decomposed to sub-band signals using IWPT. Third, the squared envelope spectra (also called envelope order spectra) of the last layer wavelet packet coefficients are obtained by the Hilbert transform and the Fourier transform. Finally, the diagnostic results can be easily determined based on the squared envelope spectra. The procedure and performance of the proposed approach are illustrated and evaluated through simulation analysis, proving that the proposed method can effectively extract the fault features. Furthermore, experimental analysis results indicate that the proposed method outperforms both EOT-WPT and SK-EOT-BPF.