Empirical wavelet transform (EWT) is a novel adaptive signal decomposition method, whose main shortcoming is the fact that Fourier segmentation is strongly dependent on the local maxima of the amplitudes of the Fourier spectrum. An enhanced empirical wavelet transform (MSCEWT) based on maximum-minimum length curve method is proposed to realize fault diagnosis of motor bearings. The maximum-minimum length curve method transforms the original vibration signal spectrum to scale space in order to obtain a set of minimum length curves, and find the maximum length curve value in the set of the minimum length curve values for obtaining the number of the spectrum decomposition intervals. The MSCEWT method is used to decompose the vibration signal into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), which are processed by Hilbert transform. Then the frequency of each component is extracted by power spectrum and compared with the theoretical value of motor bearing fault feature frequency in order to determine and obtain fault diagnosis result. In order to verify the effectiveness of the MSCEWT method for fault diagnosis, the actual motor bearing vibration signals are selected and the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) methods are selected for comparative analysis in here. The results show that the maximum-minimum length curve method can enhance EWT method and the MSCEWT method can solve the shortcomings of the Fourier spectrum segmentation and can effectively decompose the bearing vibration signal for obtaining less number of intrinsic mode function (IMF) components than the EMD and EEMD methods. It can effectively extract the fault feature frequency of the motor bearing and realize fault diagnosis. Therefore, the study provides a new method for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery.
Keywords: empirical wavelet transform; feature extraction; maximum-minimum length curve; scale space transformation; spectrum segmentation.