Vibration analysis is an established method for fault detection and diagnosis of rolling element bearings. However, it is an expert oriented exercise. To relieve the experts, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep neural networks, especially convolutional neural networks (CNN) have gained the attention of researchers because of their image classification and recognition capability. Most researchers convert the vibration signal into representative time frequency vibration images such as spectrograms and scalograms. These images are used as inputs to train the CNN model for fault diagnosis. Commonly, fault diagnosis is performed under same operating conditions, where models are trained and deployed for prediction under the same operating conditions. However, outside the laboratory environment, in real world applications, different operating conditions, such as variable speed, may be encountered. With the change in speed, the characteristic frequencies of the vibration signal will also change, which will result in changing the vibration image. Consequently, the performance of the CNN model may drop significantly for prediction under different operating conditions. Accessing the training data from all potential operating conditions may not be feasible for most real-world applications. Therefore, there is a need to find some signal properties which are invariant to change in operating conditions and only change due to change in health state so that models trained under one set of operating conditions may predict correctly under different operating conditions. This paper proposes a defect diagnosis method for rolling element bearings, under variable operating conditions (speed and load) based on CNN and order maps. These maps exhibit consistent properties under varying speed; therefore, they can be used to train the CNN model for fault diagnosis under variable speed. The effect of load change on these order maps is experimentally studied and it is found that the proposed method can undertake fault diagnosis on rolling element bearings under variable speeds and loads with high accuracy.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; convolutional neural network; intelligent defect diagnosis; order maps; rolling element bearings; variable operating conditions.