Bearing fault diagnosis based on amplitude and phase map of Hermitian wavelet transform

The rolling element bearing characteristic frequencies contain very little energy and are usually overwhelmed by noise and higher level of structural vibrations. The continuous wavelet transform enables one to look at the evolution in the time scale joint representation plane. This makes it very suitable for the detection of singularity generated by localized defects in a mechanical system. However, most applications of the continuous wavelet transform have widely focused on the use of the Morlet wavelet transform. The complex Hermitian wavelet is constructed based on the first and the second derivatives of the Gaussian function to detect signal singularities. The Fourier spectrum of Hermitian wavelet is real, which the Fourier spectrum has no complex phase and the Hermitian wavelet does not affect the phase of a signal in complex domain. This gives the desirable ability to detect the singularity characteristic of a signal precisely. In this study, the Hermitian wavelet amplitude and phase map are used in conjunction to detect and diagnose the bearing fault. The Hermitian wavelet amplitude and phase map are found to show distinctive signatures in the presence of bearing inner race or outer race damage. The simulative and experimental results show that the Hermitian wavelet amplitude and phase map can extract the transients from strong noise signals and can effectively diagnose bearing faults.