Early fault feature extraction of bearings based on Teager energy operator and optimal VMD

As the fault shock component in vibration signals is extremely sparse and weak, it is difficult to extract the fault features when large-scale, low-speed and heavy-duty mechanical equipment is in the early stage of failure. To solve this problem, an early fault feature extraction method based on the Teager energy operator, combined with optimal variational mode decomposition (VMD) is presented in this study. First, the Teager energy operator was used to strengthen the weak shock component of the original signal. Next, a logistic-sine complex chaotic mapping with variable dimensions was constructed to enhance the global search ability and convergence speed of the pigeon-inspired optimization (PIO) algorithm, which is named the variable dimension chaotic pigeon-inspired optimization (VDCPIO) algorithm. Then, the VDCPIO algorithm is used to search for the optimal combination value of key parameters of VMD. The enhanced vibration signal is decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by the optimized VMD, and then kurtosis for every IMF and mean kurtosis of all IMFs are extracted. According to the average kurtosis, several IMFs, whose kurtosis value is greater than the average kurtosis value, are selected to reconstruct a new signal. Then, envelope spectrum analysis of the reconstructed signal is carried out to extract the early fault features. Finally, experimental verification of the method was performed using the simulated signal and measured signal from a rolling bearing; the experimental results indicate that the method presented in this paper is more effective to extract the early fault features of this kind of mechanical equipment.