Adaptive minimum noise amplitude deconvolution and its application for early fault diagnosis of rolling bearings

To address the challenge of detecting early faults in rolling bearings, where weak fault features are occasionally obscured by background noise, an innovative early fault diagnosis method based on adaptive minimum noise amplitude deconvolution (MNAD) is introduced. Initially, a correlation Gini index function is defined to estimate the fault period, while leveraging the iterative advantages of MNAD to progressively approach the true fault period. This resolution effectively overcomes the requirement of prior knowledge regarding the fault period, thus reducing the number of input parameters. Subsequently, a composite index, combining square envelope Gini index and square envelope entropy, is constructed as the fitness function. The sand cat swarm optimization algorithm is employed to adaptively determine the optimal noise ratio and filter length for deconvolution, ensuring the acquisition of the finest filtered signal. Ultimately, envelope spectrum analysis is conducted on the filtered signal to extract fault features and facilitate early fault diagnosis. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through simulated and experimental data, highlighting its superior feature extraction capabilities and robustness compared to original MNAD and other sophisticated blind deconvolution methods.