An Enhanced Energy Operator for Bearing Fault Detection

This paper reports an enhanced energy operator (EEO) method to detect bearing faults. This new energy operator exploits both the interference handling capability of a differentiation step and the noise suppression nature of the integration process. All these elements, i.e., differentiation, integration and energy operator, are implemented by a simple formula in one step. The main advantages of the proposed method include its simplicity, computational efficiency and the elimination of the bandpass filtering step and hence the resonance information. As such, it is suited to on-line bearing fault detection in a noisy environment with multiple vibration interferences. Our simulation studies have shown that the EEO method outperforms the conventional energy operator and the enveloping methods in handling both noise and interferences. Its performance has also been examined using our experimental data.