Machinery Fault Diagnosis Scheme Using Redefined Dimensionless Indicators and mRMR Feature Selection

Machinery fault diagnosis methods based on dimensionless indicators have long been studied. However, traditional dimensionless indicators usually suffer a low diagnostic accuracy for mechanical components. Toward this end, an effective fault diagnosis method based on redefined dimensionless indicators (RDIs) and minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) is proposed to identify the health conditions of mechanical components. In the proposed method, the vibration signals are first processed by the variational mode decomposition, and multiple RDIs are constructed based on the decomposed signals. Subsequently, the mRMR approach is introduced to select the RDIs and several important RDIs can be obtained. Finally, the obtained RDIs are fed into a grid search support vector machine to perform fault pattern identification. To verify the superiority of the proposed method, two experimental examples for different fault types of mechanical components including rolling bearing and gearbox are conducted. The experimental results demonstrated that the RDIs as new fault features can effectively solve the deficiency of the traditional dimensionless indicator, and has stronger distinguishing ability for machinery faults. Additionally, our proposed method successfully differentiated 12 fault conditions of rolling bearings and nine fault conditions of gears with average accuracies of 97.47% and 97.12% with 11 and 5 RDIs, respectively.