Selective weighted multi-scale morphological filter for fault feature extraction of rolling bearings

Morphological filtering shows effectiveness in vibration signal analysis because of its simplicity and efficiency. Considering that different structural elements have different effects on filtering results, a new multi-scale morphological filtering (MMF) method called selective weighted multi-scale morphological filter (SWMMF) is developed for integrating results of different scales based on adaptive weighting strategy. Firstly, four morphological operators (dilation-closing, closing-dilation, erosion-opening and opening-erosion) are integrated into a new combination difference morphological filter to strengthen effect of faulty component extraction. Secondly, this new morphological filter is further extended to multiple scales in order to overcome limitation of single scale filter. Finally, the filtered results of different scales are adaptively combined by using the whale optimization algorithm (WOA)-based selective weighting method. The effectiveness of multi-scale filter and selective weights is proved by comparing with single-scale and average weighting filter on simulation and real-world cases (bearing vibration signals with different defects). The testing results on vibration signals indicate that SWMMF is able to extract effectively defect frequency and the corresponding multiplication frequencies from bearing vibration signals with heavy noise. The testing results illustrate that SWMMF outperforms other representative MMFs (e.g., weighted multi-scale morphological gradient operator (WMMG), weighted multi-scale difference operator (WMDIF), weighted multi-scale average operator (WMAVG)) on impulsive feature extraction of bearing vibrations signals with various defects. Moreover, it is demonstrated that SWMMF has good applicability in bearing fault diagnosis due to setup of adaptive weights and selection of structure element.