Compound fault diagnosis for a rolling bearing using adaptive DTCWPT with higher order spectra

Fault diagnosis plays a vital role in prognostics and health management. Researchers have devoted their efforts in enhancing the accuracy of fault diagnosis. However, diagnosis of compound faults in complex systems is still a challenging task. The problem lies in the coupling of multiple signals, which may conceal the characteristics of compound faults. Taking a rolling bearing as an example, this study aims to boost the accuracy of compound fault diagnosis through a novel feature extraction approach to making the fault characteristics more discriminative. The approach proposes an adaptive dual-tree complex wavelet packet transform (DTCWPT) with higher order spectra analysis. To flexibly and best match the characteristics of the measured vibration signals under analysis, DTCWPT is first adaptively determined by the minimum singular value decomposition entropy. Then, higher order spectra analysis is performed on the decomposed frequency sensitive band for feature extraction and enhancement. The proposed approach is used to analyze experimental signals of a bearing’s compound faults and found effective.