Design a degradation condition monitoring system scheme for rolling bearing using EMD and PCA

Purpose - Rolling bearings based on rotating machinery are one of the most widely used in industrial applications because of their low cost, high performance and robustness. The purpose of this paper is to describe how to identify degradation condition of rolling bearing and predict its fault time in big data environment in order to achieve zero downtime performance and preventive maintenance for the rolling bearing. Design/methodology/approach - The degradation characteristic parameters of rolling bearings including intrinsic mode energy and failure frequency were, respectively, extracted from the pre-processed original vibration signals using EMD and Hilbert transform. Then, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient and PCA were used to obtain the health index of the rolling bearing so as to detect the appearance of degradations. Furthermore, the degradation condition of the rolling bearings might be identified through implementing the monotonicity analysis, robustness analysis and degradation analysis of the health index. Findings - The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a case study. The result shows that the proposed method can be applied to monitor the degradation condition of the rolling bearings in industrial application. Research limitations/implications - Further experiment remains to be done so as to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method using Apache Hadoop when massive sensor data are available. Practical implications - The paper proposes a methodology for rolling bearing condition monitoring representing the steps that need to be followed. Real-time sensor data are utilized to find the degradation characteristics. Originality/value - The result of the work presented in this paper form the basis for the software development and implementation of condition monitoring system for rolling bearings based on Hadoop.