Rolling Bearing Composite Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Enhanced Harmonic Vector Analysis

Composite fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is very challenging work, especially when the characteristic frequency ranges of different fault types overlap. To solve this problem, an enhanced harmonic vector analysis (EHVA) method was proposed. Firstly, the wavelet threshold (WT) denoising method is used to denoise the collected vibration signals to reduce the influence of noise. Next, harmonic vector analysis (HVA) is used to remove the convolution effect of the signal transmission path, and blind separation of fault signals is carried out. The cepstrum threshold is used in HVA to enhance the harmonic structure of the signal, and a Wiener-like mask will be constructed to make the separated signals more independent in each iteration. Then, the backward projection technique is used to align the frequency scale of the separated signals, and each fault signal can be obtained from composite fault diagnosis signals. Finally, to make the fault characteristics more prominent, a kurtogram was used to find the resonant frequency band of the separated signals by calculating its spectral kurtosis. Semi-physical simulation experiments are conducted using the rolling bearing fault experiment data to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method, EHVA, can effectively extract the composite faults of rolling bearings. Compared to fast independent component analysis (FICA) and traditional HVA, EHVA improves separation accuracy, enhances fault characteristics, and has higher accuracy and efficiency compared to fast multichannel blind deconvolution (FMBD).