An adaptive and tacholess order analysis method based on enhanced empirical wavelet transform for fault detection of bearings with varying speeds

The order tracking method based on time-frequency representation is regarded as an effective tool for fault detection of bearings with varying rotating speeds. In the traditional order tracking methods, a tachometer is required to obtain the instantaneous speed which is hardly satisfied in practice due to the technical and economical limitations. Some tacholess order tracking methods have been developed in recent years. In these methods, the instantaneous frequency ridge extraction is one of the most important parts. However, the current ridge extraction methods are sensitive to noise and may easily get trapped in a local optimum. Due to the presence of noise and other unrelated components of the signal, bearing fault features are difficult to be detected from the envelope spectrum or envelope order spectrum. To overcome the abovementioned drawbacks, an adaptive and tacholess order analysis method is proposed in this paper. In this method, a novel ridge extraction algorithm based on dynamic path optimization is adopted to estimate the instantaneous frequency. This algorithm can overcome the shortcomings of the current ridge extraction algorithms. Meanwhile, the enhanced empirical wavelet transform (EEWT) algorithm is applied to extract the bearing fault features. Both simulated and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is robust to noise and effective for bearing fault detection under variable speed conditions. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.