Maximum cross-correlated kurtosis-based unsaturated stochastic resonance and its application to bearing fault diagnosis

Abstract Considering the random impulses of mechanical noise and the limitations involved while identifying mechanical fault impulse signals via traditional measurement indices of signal-to-noise ratio, which require the characteristic frequency to be known in advance, this study proposes an adaptive unsaturated stochastic resonance method employing maximum cross-correlated kurtosis as the signal detection index. The proposed method combines the features of a cross-correlated coefficient to indicate periodic fault transients and those of spectrum kurtosis to locate these transients in the frequency domain. Actual vibration signals collected from motor and gear bearings subjected to heavy noise are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Through a coarse tree-based machine learning method, the proposed method is verified to be more suitable for explaining the periodic impulse components of bearing signals, as compared to the ensemble empirical mode decomposition denoising method and unsaturated stochastic resonance using the kurtosis-intercorrelation index.