Feature Extraction Strategy with Improved Permutation Entropy and Its Application in Fault Diagnosis of Bearings

Feature extraction is one of the most difficult aspects of mechanical fault diagnosis, and it is directly related to the accuracy of bearing fault diagnosis. In this study, improved permutation entropy (IPE) is defined as the feature for bearing fault diagnosis. In this method, ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), a self-adaptive time-frequency analysis method, is used to process the vibration signals, and a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) can thus be obtained. A feature extraction strategy based on statistical analysis is then presented for IPE, where the so-called optimal number of permutation entropy (PE) values used for an IPE is adaptively selected. The obtained IPE-based samples arc then input to a support vector machine (SVM) model. Subsequently, a trained SVM can be constructed as the classifier for bearing fault diagnosis. Finally, experimental vibration signals are applied to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and the results show that the proposed method can effectively and accurately diagnose bearing faults, such as inner race faults, outer race faults, and ball faults.