Vibration analysis for bearing fault detection and classification using an intelligent filter

This paper proposes an intelligent method based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) to detect bearing defects of induction motors. In this method, the vibration signal passes through removing non-bearing fault component (RNFC) filter, designed by neural networks, in order to remove its non-bearing fault components, and then enters the second neural network that uses pattern recognition techniques for fault classification. Four different categories include; healthy, inner race defect, outer race defect, and double holes in outer race are investigated. Compared to the regular fault detection methods that use frequency-domain features, the proposed method is based on analyzing time-domain features which needs less computational effort. Moreover, machine and bearing parameters, and the vibration signal spectrum distribution are not required in this method. It is shown that better results are achieved when the filtered component of the vibration signal is used for fault classification rather than common methods that use directly vibration signal. Experimental results on three-phase induction motor verify the ability of the proposed method in fault diagnosis despite low quality (noisy) of measured vibration signal. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.