Bearing Fault Analysis using Variational Mode Decomposition

Abstract

Bearing health analysis plays a significant role in industry to improve reliability and performance of critical processes by alarming the faults at early stages. Conventional techniques do not guarantee to detect the faults at early stages because the low energy bearing frequencies get suppressed by stern noise and higher vibrations. The fast Fourier transform (FFT) fails to analyze the transient and nonstationary signals directly. This paper performs the signal analysis on vibration data of ball bearing using variational mode decomposition (VMD). First the intrinsic mode functions are extracted using VMD followed by FFT and finally the status of bearing is analyzed to be faulty or impeccable. The VMD can extract close tone vibration signatures and takes less computation time.
Keywords: Ball bearing, Accelerometer sensor, Variational mode decomposition (VMD), Empirical mode decomposition (EMD), Fast Fourier transform (FFT)