An improved extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition method and its application to rolling bearing fault diagnosis

HHT (Hilbert-Huang Transform) which consist of EMD (Empirical Mode Decomposition) and HT (Hilbert Transform) now is the most widely used time-frequency analysis technique for rolling element bearing fault diagnosis, however, its fault characteristic information extraction accuracy is usually limited due to the problem of mode mixing in EMD. ESMD (Extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition) is a novel development of HHT which is promising to alleviate this limitation and it has been applied to some fields successfully, but its application for rolling bearing fault diagnosis has rarely been seen in the literature. In this paper, ESMD is applied to extract the bearing fault characteristics for rolling bearing fault detection, and the results proved that ESMD can have a better fault diagnose effect than EMD and HT. What's more, for further improving bearing fault characteristic extraction accuracy of rolling bearing vibration signals, the sifting scheme is proposed for selecting the sensitive fault-related IMFs (intrinsic mode functions) generated by ESMD, in which a weighted kurtosis index is introduced for automatic selection and reconstruction of the fault-related IMFs, and then the original and reconstructed bearing fault vibration signal after performing Hilbert transform as the results to diagnose the incipient rolling bearing fault. ESMD combined with the proposed sifting scheme are applied to diagnose the simulated and experimental signals, and the results confirmed that the sifting scheme based ESMD is superior to the other conventional method in rolling bearings fault diagnosis.