A bearing fault diagnosis method based on sparse decomposition theory

The bearing fault information is often interfered or lost in the background noise after the vibration signal being transferred complicatedly, which will make it very difficult to extract fault features from the vibration signals. To avoid the problem in choosing and extracting the fault features in bearing fault diagnosing, a novelty fault diagnosis method based on sparse decomposition theory is proposed. Certain over-complete dictionaries are obtained by training, on which the bearing vibration signals corresponded to different states can be decomposed sparsely. The fault detection and state identification can be achieved based on the fact that the sparse representation errors of the signal on different dictionaries are different. The effects of the representation error threshold and the number of dictionary atoms used in signal decomposition to the fault diagnosis are analyzed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated with experimental bearing vibration signals.