Robust performance degradation assessment methods for enhanced rolling element bearing prognostics

Bearing failure is one of the foremost causes of breakdowns in rotating machinery and such failure can be catastrophic, resulting in costly downtime. One of the key issues in bearing prognostics is to detect the defect at its incipient stage and alert the operator before it develops into a catastrophic failure. Signal de-noising and extraction of the weak signature are crucial to bearing prognostics since the inherent deficiency of the measuring mechanism often introduces a great amount of noise to the signal. In addition, the signature of a defective bearing is spread across a wide frequency band and hence can easily become masked by noise and low frequency effects. As a result, robust methods are needed to provide more evident information for bearing performance assessment and prognostics. This paper introduces enhanced and robust prognostic methods for rolling element bearing including a wavelet filter based method for weak signature enhancement for fault identification and Self Organizing Map (SOM) based method for performance degradation assessment. The experimental results demonstrate that the bearing defects can be detected at an early stage of development when both optimal wavelet filter and SOM method are used. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.