A rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on VMD - multiscale fractal dimension/energy and optimized support vector machine

To achieve the goal of automated rolling bearing fault diagnosis, a variational mode decomposition (VMD) based diagnosis scheme was proposed. VMD was firstly used to decompose the vibration signals into a series of band-limited intrinsic mode functions (BLIMFs). Subsequently, the multiscale fractal dimension (MSFD) and multiscale energy (MSEN) of each BLIMF were calculated and combined together as features of the original vibration signals. In an attempt to accelerate the classification speed, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test was adopted to extract significant features from the redundant features. Finally, those significant features were fed into the optimized support vector machine (SVM), which was optimized by the genetic algorithm (GA), for classification. Experimental results on the international public Case Western Reserve University bearing data indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method with a classification accuracy of 99.75 % for seven classes. Moreover, our approach also shows good anti-noise performance in different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).