We propose a novel fault-diagnosis approach for rolling bearings by integrating variational mode decomposition (VMD), refined composite multiscale dispersion entropy (RCMDE), and support vector machine (SVM) optimized by a sparrow search algorithm (SSA). Firstly, VMD was selected from various signal decomposition methods to decompose the original signal. Then, the signal features were extracted by RCMDE as the input of the diagnosis model. Compared with multiscale sample entropy (MSE) and multiscale dispersion entropy (MDE), RCMDE proved to be superior. Afterwards, SSA was used to search the optimal parameters of SVM to identify different faults. Finally, the proposed coordinated VMD-RCMDE-SSA-SVM approach was verified and evaluated by the experimental data collected by the wind turbine drivetrain diagnostics simulator (WTDS). The results of the experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach not only identifies bearing fault types quickly and effectively but also achieves better performance than other comparative methods.
Keywords: fault diagnosis; refined composite multiscale dispersion entropy (RCMDE); sparrow search algorithm (SSA); support vector machine (SVM); variational mode decomposition (VMD).