Rolling bearing fault diagnosis based on improved whale-optimization- algorithm–variational-mode-decomposition method

Abstract

Rolling bearings are a key component of rotating machinery and their health directly affects the safe operation of mechanical equipment. Therefore, fault diagnose for rolling bearings is very important. The fault diagnosis process of rolling bearings includes three stages: signal decomposition, feature extraction, and pattern recognition. Variational mode decomposition (VMD) can suppress end effects, but improper parameter settings will cause information losses or excessive decomposition. In this work, an improved whale optimization algorithm (IWOA) is applied to parameter settings of VMD. Correspondingly, an IWOA-VMD signal decomposition method is proposed. The decomposed signal is combined with a Laplace score method and classifier to remove the redundancy and noise in the feature set and obtain a low-dimensional sensitive feature subset. Then, aiming at the problem of the parameter settings of a least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) affecting the recognition performance and accuracy, a salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is used to globally optimize the penalty parameter and kernel width in the LSSVM to establish an SSA-LSSVM fault recognition model. This model is applied to the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. In particular, rolling bearing fault samples at Case Western Reserve University are used to verify the method. The results indicate that the proposed method is effective and improves the speed and accuracy of fault diagnosis.