Fault Feature Selection and Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings Based on EEMD and Optimized Elman_AdaBoost Algorithm

To realize accurate fault diagnosis of rolling bearing under random noise, a novel fault diagnosis method based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and optimized Elman_AdaBoost is proposed in this paper. First, the EEMD method is used to decompose the original vibration signal into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Then, the correlation coefficient and kurtosis of IMFs are used to remove any excess ingredients, and the signal is reconstructed by using the rest of IMFs. In addition, based on the analysis of the time–frequency characteristics of the reconstructed signal, the root-mean-square value and the power spectrum center are extracted as a 2-D feature vector from each reconstructed signal and regarded as the input characteristic vector of the Elman neural network. Combined with the AdaBoost classification algorithm, the Elman_AdaBoost algorithm is improved and proposed to establish the strong classifier. Finally, based on the vibration data recorded in the bearing center of the Case Western Reserve University, three kinds of bearings with different faults and normal bearings are selected as the sample data and the training samples and test samples are constructed. Experimental results show that the proposed EEMD method and optimized Elman_AdaBoost model can effectively diagnose the rolling bearing under random noise, and has the advantages of fast speed, small error, and stable performance. Comparing with the traditional Elman_AdaBoost and single Elman neural network algorithm, this paper with fewer characteristics can get better accuracy and real-time processing performance, and presents a simple and practical resolution for the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings.