A New Hybrid Intelligent Technique Based on Improving the Compensation Distance Evaluation Technique and Support Vector Machine for Bearing Fault Diagnosis

In this paper, a new hybrid intelligent method is presented for detecting the bearing faults in the various rotating speeds. The vibration signals are collected in four conditions, including the normal state, the faulty inner race, the faulty outer race, and the faulty bearing element. Firstly, twenty-two statistical features in the time domain and four frequency features, three Wavelet packet decomposition (WPD), and the first five intrinsic mode functions obtained by the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) are extracted from the original signal; finally, the feature vector for each signal sample has 424 features. However, in the high dimensional feature matrix, there may exist the insensitive features to the presence of defects. Therefore, in this study, the compensation distance evaluation technique (CDET) is used to select the optimal features. Then, the selected features are used as the inputs of the support vector machine (SVM) classifier to diagnose the bearing conditions. In the CDET method, there is a threshold indicator that plays a decisive role in choosing the desired attributes. Also, the SVM method has some parameters that need to be set during the fault detection process. Therefore, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to determine the optimal threshold in the CDET method and the optimal SVM parameters, so that the prediction error of the bearing conditions and the number of the selected features are minimized. The obtained results demonstrate that the selected features are well able to differentiate between different bearing conditions at various speeds. Comparing the results of this paper with other fault detection methods indicates the ability of the proposed method.