A New Feature Extraction Method Based on EEMD and Multi-Scale Fuzzy Entropy for Motor Bearing

Feature extraction is one of the most important, pivotal, and difficult problems in mechanical fault diagnosis, which directly relates to the accuracy of fault diagnosis and the reliability of early fault prediction. Therefore, a new fault feature extraction method, called the EDOMFE method based on integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), mode selection, and multi-scale fuzzy entropy is proposed to accurately diagnose fault in this paper. The EEMD method is used to decompose the vibration signal into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) with a different physical significance. The correlation coefficient analysis method is used to calculate and determine three improved IMFs, which are close to the original signal. The multi-scale fuzzy entropy with the ability of effective distinguishing the complexity of different signals is used to calculate the entropy values of the selected three IMFs in order to form a feature vector with the complexity measure, which is regarded as the inputs of the support vector machine (SVM) model for training and constructing a SVM classifier (EOMSMFD based on EDOMFE and SVM) for fulfilling fault pattern recognition. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by real bearing vibration signals of the motor with different loads and fault severities. The experiment results show that the proposed EDOMFE method can effectively extract fault features from the vibration signal and that the proposed EOMSMFD method can accurately diagnose the fault types and fault severities for the inner race fault, the outer race fault, and rolling element fault of the motor bearing. Therefore, the proposed method provides a new fault diagnosis technology for rotating machinery.