An improved higher-order analytical energy operator with adaptive local iterative filtering for early fault diagnosis of bearings

Early fault diagnosis in rolling bearings is crucial to maintenance and safety in industry. To highlight the weak fault features from complex signals combined with multiple interferences and heavy background noise, a novel approach for bearing fault diagnosis based on higher-order analytic energy operator (HO-AEO) and adaptive local iterative filtering (ALIF) is put forward. HO-AEO has better effect in dealing with heavy noise. However, it is subjected to the limitation of mono-components. To solve this limitation, ALIF is adopted firstly to decompose the nonlinear, non-stationary signals into multiple mono-components adaptively. In the next, the resonance frequency band as the optimal intrinsic mode function (IMF) is selected according to the maximum kurtosis. In the following, HO-AEO is utilized to highlight weak fault characteristics of the selected IMF. Finally, the early bearing fault is diagnosed by the energy operator spectrum based on fast Fourier transform (FFT). Comparisons in the simulation indicate that the fourth order HO-AEO shows the best performance in fault diagnosis compared with Teager energy operator (TEO), analytic energy operator (AEO), the second and the third order HO-AEO. The simulated test and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach could effectively extract weak fault characteristics from contaminated vibration signals.