Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings based on WOA-VMD

Abstract

VMD (Variational mode decomposition) is a commonly used method for processing rolling bearing fault signals. VMD enables efficient separation of intrinsic modal components and it can match the best center frequency and the appropriate bandwidth range for each mode. It should be noted that the number of modalities and penalty parameters need to be set before execution. We propose an optimization algorithm for VMD based on the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) and then select an iterative formula for the iterative update. The formula is chosen in terms of the magnitude of the convergence factor to output the best VMD parameters. The effectiveness of this method is proved through the processing of the rolling bearing inner ring fault signal.