Vibro acoustic signal analysis in fault finding of bearing using Empirical Mode Decomposition

Bearing fault is an issue in process and control industries, and has significant impact in the production flow. The behaviour of the machinery can be well understood from the frictional forces of the bearing due to load, and also the wear and tear of the ball bearings. The characteristic of this ball bearing can predict the exact nature of the load and any future malfunction in the operating equipments. The signals generated from these bearings can be of any types i.e., sound or vibration. The acoustic phenomenon is tough to predict in noisy environment, where as the vibration data can be used when the acoustic cannot be the source of information. In general the fault diagnosis in bearing is done by comparing the mathematical interpreted data with vibration signal. This method can only be applicable to those system where the complete information about the ball bearing is known. But, this paper predict the fault in the ball bearing using acoustic and vibration signatures without knowing complete bearing information. Signal processing is used rather than using both signal processing and mathematical formulation all together to predict the fault in the bearing under different states. The signal analysis using FFT fails to analyse the signals of transient and non-stationary in nature. The extraction and analysis of the transient signal can be better done using Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) technique.