Research and Development of a Chaotic Signal Synchronization Error Dynamics-Based Ball Bearing Fault Diagnostor

This paper describes the fault diagnosis in the operation of industrial ball bearings. In order to cluster the very small differential signals of the four classic fault types of the ball bearing system, the chaos synchronization (CS) concept is used in this study as the chaos system is very sensitive to a system’s variation such as initial conditions or system parameters. In this study, the Chen-Lee chaotic system was used to load the normal and fault signals of the bearings into the chaos synchronization error dynamics system. The fractal theory was applied to determine the fractal dimension and lacunarity from the CS error dynamics. Extenics theory was then applied to distinguish the state of the bearing faults. This study also compared the proposed method with discrete Fourier transform and wavelet packet analysis. According to the results, it is shown that the proposed chaos synchronization method combined with extenics theory can separate the characteristics (fractal dimension vs. lacunarity) completely. Therefore, it has a better fault diagnosis rate than the two traditional signal processing methods, i.e., Fourier transform and wavelet packet analysis combined with extenics theory. OPEN ACCESS Entropy 2014, 16 5359