An energy operator approach to joint application of amplitude and frequency-demodulations for bearing fault detection

Bearings are among the most frequently used components. Bearing failure could lead to complete stall of a mechanical system, unpredicted productivity loss for production facilities or catastrophic consequence for mission-critical equipment. As such, bearing fault detection and diagnosis is an imperative part of most of preventive maintenance procedures. This paper presents a parameter independent yet simple to implement fault detection technique. The Teager energy operator is tailored to extract both the amplitude and frequency modulations of the vibration signals measured from mechanical systems. The incorporation of the frequency modulation information into the proposed bearing fault detection method has eliminated the need for interference removal steps. As the amplitude demodulation (AD) is also inherent in the energy operator, the fault frequency can be detected from the spectrum of the energy-transformed signal. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated using both simulated and experimental data. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.