Rolling Element Bearing Diagnostics Using Extended Phase Space Topology

This paper introduces a novel method called extended phase space topology (EPST) for machinery diagnostics and pattern recognition. In particular, the research focuses on fault detection and diagnostics of rolling element bearings. The proposed method is based on mapping the vibrational response onto the density space and approximating the density using orthogonal functions. The method has been applied to vibration data of a rotating machine where the data were measured by proximity probes. The method was applied to two operating conditions: constant operating speed and variable operating speed. As will be shown, the proposed feature extraction method has an outstanding capability in characterizing the system response and diagnosing the system. The method is evidently robust to noise, does not depend on expert knowledge about the system, requires no feature ranking or selection, and can easily be applied in an automated process. Finally, a comparison with utilization of statistical features is performed for each operating condition, which demonstrates that the proposed method performs better than the traditional statistical methods.