Acoustic Fault Diagnosis of Rotor Bearing System

Early diagnosis of failures can prevent financial losses and industry downtime. In this article, the author proposes an early fault diagnosis technique for rotor-bearing faults. The proposed technique is based on the recognition of sound signals. The author measured and analyzed the three states of the rotor-bearing system: the rotor-bearing system under normal operating conditions, the rotor-bearing system with faulty bearings, and the rotor-bearing system with rotor friction. In this article, an original feature extraction method is described, namely, the 1/3 doubling method (a method of selecting the amplitude of the frequency ratio that is a multiple of 30% of the maximum amplitude). This method is used to form feature vectors. A classification of the obtained vectors was performed by the KNN (K-nearest neighbor classifier), the SVM (support vector machine), and the decision tree. The method is also compared with the Fourier synchrosqueezed transform. The experimental results show that the method can diagnose early faults of rotor-bearing systems simply and quickly and can be used to protect the safe operation of mechanical equipment.