Improved multi-bandwidth mode manifold for enhanced bearing fault diagnosis

Abstract Variational mode decomposition (VMD) has been proved to be useful for extraction of fault-induced transients of rolling bearings. Multi-bandwidth mode manifold (Triple M, TM) is one variation of the VMD, which units multiple fault-related modes with different bandwidths by a nonlinear manifold learning algorithm named local tangent space alignment (LTSA). The merit of the TM method is that the bearing fault-induced transients extracted contain low level of in-band noise without optimization of the VMD parameters. However, the determination of the neighborhood size of the LTSA is time-consuming, and the extracted fault-induced transients may have the problem of asymmetry in the up-and-down direction. This paper aims to improve the performance of the TM method. The major contribution of the improved TM method for bearing fault diagnosis is that the pure fault-induced transients are extracted efficiently and are symmetrical as the real. Specifically, the multi-bandwidth modes consisting of the fault-related modes with different bandwidths are first obtained by repeating the recycling VMD (RVMD) method with different bandwidth balance parameters. Then, the LTSA algorithm is performed on the multi-bandwidth modes to extract their inherent manifold structure, in which the natural nearest neighbor (Triple N, TN) algorithm is adopted to efficiently and reasonably select the neighbors of each data point in the multi-bandwidth modes. Finally, a weight-based feature compensation strategy is designed to synthesize the low-dimensional manifold features to alleviate the asymmetry problem, resulting in a symmetric TM feature that can represent the real fault transient components. One simulation analysis and two experimental applications in bearing fault diagnosis validate the enhanced performance of the improved TM method proposed over the traditional methods.