Health Indicator Effectiveness in Localized Fault Diagnosis: Rolling bearing elements

Constant tracking of a state indicator curve derived from signal features defines the main body of the prediction in the remaining useful life of assert or its components. In this paper, the effectiveness of the pre-processing techniques to extract suitable health indicators and trace fault degradation on rolling element bearing is studied on a practical dataset. As a first step, the envelope analysis is performed to evaluate characteristic frequencies associated with inner and outer race faults. Then, its amplitude spectrum’s effectiveness as a health indicator regarding the fault evaluation is analyzed. As results show, due to the non-stationary nature of the vibration signal, this approach can be used to identify the type of fault in addition to the Root Mean Square value as the main health indicator to have an estimation on the level of degradation of bearing.