Rolling element bearing diagnosis based on probability box theory

Abstract Feature extraction leads to the loss of statistical information of raw data and ignores the sampling uncertainty and the fluctuations in the signal over time in mechanical fault diagnosis. In this paper, novel modeling methods for mechanical signals based on probability box theory were proposed to solve the above problem. First, the type of random distribution of the bearing signals were analyzed. Then, a Dempster-Shafer structure was obtained to establish a probability box model. To address the identification difficulty of the type of random distribution for the bearing signals, a second probability box model was established based on a vector consisting of features from the bearing signals. If the data are not found to follow a random distribution, a third modeling method based on the definition of probability boxes was proposed. The effectiveness and applicability of the three proposed models were compared with experimental data from rolling element bearings. The combination of probability box theory and mechanical fault diagnosis theory can open up a new research direction for mechanical fault diagnosis.