Fractional Dimensionless Indicator with Random Forest for Bearing Fault Diagnosis under Variable Speed Conditions

Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings under variable speed is a common issue in engineering practice, but it lacks an effective diagnosis algorithm, while approaches developed for steady speed cannot be directly applied. Therefore, for effectively identifying bearing faults under variable speed, this paper proposed a multiscale fractional dimensionless indicator (MSFDI) and put forward a fault diagnosis method with random forest (RF). It can overcome the feature space aliasing problem of traditional dimensionless indicators, which will lead to increased diagnosis uncertainty. The multiorder fractional Fourier transform is carried out on bearing signals to get a series of fractional Fourier domain components, which will be used to construct the original MSFDI feature set. Moreover, reliefF selects the sensitive MSFDIs as the input of the RF algorithm to determine the health condition. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments and case studies.