A Signal Based Triangular Structuring Element for Mathematical Morphological Analysis and Its Application in Rolling Element Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Mathematical morphology (MM) is an efficient nonlinear signal processing tool. It can be adopted to extract fault information from bearing signal according to a structuring element (SE). Since the bearing signal features differ for every unique cause of failure, the SEs should be well tailored to extract the fault feature from a particular signal. In the following, a signal based triangular SE according to the statistics of the magnitude of a vibration signal is proposed, together with associated methodology, which processes the bearing signal by MM analysis based on proposed SE to get the morphology spectrum of a signal. A correlation analysis on morphology spectrum is then employed to obtain the final classification of bearing faults. The classification performance of the proposed method is evaluated by a set of bearing vibration signals with inner race, ball, and outer race faults, respectively. Results show that all faults can be detected clearly and correctly. Compared with a commonly used flat SE, the correlation analysis on morphology spectrum with proposed SE gives better performance at fault diagnosis of bearing, especially the identification of the location of outer race fault and the level of fault severity.