Application of the laplace-wavelet combined with ANN for rolling bearing fault diagnosis

A new technique for an automated detection and diagnosis of rolling bearing faults is presented. The time-domain vibration signals of rolling bearings with different fault conditions are preprocessed using Laplace-wavelet transform for features' extraction. The extracted features for wavelet transform coefficients in time and frequency domains are applied as input vectors to artificial neural networks (ANNs) for rolling bearing fault classification. The Laplace-Wavelet shape and the ANN classifier parameters are optimized using a genetic algorithm. To reduce the computation cost, decrease the size, and enhance the reliability of the ANN, only the predominant wavelet transform scales are selected for features' extraction. The results for both real and simulated bearing vibration data show the effectiveness of the proposed technique for bearing condition identification with very high success rates using minimum input features.