Incipient Fault Detection of Rolling Element Bearings Based on Deep EMD-PCA Algorithm

Due to the relatively weak early fault characteristics of rolling bearings, the difficulty of early fault detection increases. For unsolving this problem, an incipient fault detection method based on deep empirical mode decomposition and principal component analysis (Deep EMD-PCA) is proposed. In this method, multiple data processing layers are created to extract weak incipient fault features, and EMD is used to decompose the vibration signal. This method establishes an accurate data mode, which can improve the incipient fault detection capability. It overcomes the difficulties of incipient fault detection, in which weak fault features can be extracted from the background of strong noise. From a theoretical point of view, this paper proves that the Deep EMD-PCA method can retain more variance information and has a good early fault detection ability. The experiment results indicate that the detection rate of Deep EMD-PCA is about 85%, and the failure detection delay time is almost zero. The incipient faults of rolling element bearings can be detected accurately and timely by Deep EMD-PCA. The method effectively improves the accuracy and timeliness of fault detection under actual working conditions and has good practical application value.