A kurtosis-guided adaptive demodulation technique for bearing fault detection based on tunable-Q wavelet transform

This paper presents an adaptive demodulation technique for bearing fault detection. It is implemented via the tunable-Q wavelet transform (TQWT). With the TQWT, the bearing vibration signal is decomposed into sub-signals corresponding to different band-pass filters of the TQWT. Kurtosis as an effective indicator of signal impulsiveness is adopted to guide the merging of the sub-signals leading to a signal component which contains information most relevant to the bearing fault. The purpose of the proposed approach is to adaptively search for the best filter for envelope demodulation analysis. In fact, the implementation of the proposed method can be interpreted as the process to obtain the optimal filter for the Hilbert demodulation analysis by two steps of merging of the band-pass filters of the TQWT. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated by both simulation and experimental analyses.