Rolling bearing is an important part guaranteeing the normal operation of rotating machinery, which is also prone to various damages due to severe running conditions. However, it is usually difficult to extract the weak fault characteristic information from rolling bearing vibration signals and to realize a rolling bearing fault diagnosis. Hence, this paper offers a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on successive variational mode decomposition (SVMD) and the energy concentration and position accuracy (EP) index. Since SVMD decomposes a vibration signal of a rolling bearing into a number of modes, it is difficult to select the target mode with the ideal fault characteristic information. Comprehensively considering the energy concentration degree and frequency position accuracy of the fault characteristic component, the EP index is proposed to indicate the target mode. As the balancing parameter is crucial to the performance of SVMD and must be set properly, the line search method guided by the EP index is introduced to determine an optimal value for the balancing parameter of SVMD. The simulation and experiment results demonstrate that the proposed SVMD method is effective for rolling bearing fault diagnosis and superior to the variational mode decomposition (VMD) method.
Keywords: EP index; fault diagnosis; rolling bearing; squared envelope spectrum; successive variational mode decomposition.