Detection of Bearing Faults Using a Novel Adaptive Morphological Update Lifting Wavelet

The current morphological wavelet technologies utilize a fixed filter or a linear decomposition algorithm, which cannot cope with the sudden changes, such as impulses or edges in a signal effectively. This paper presents a novel signal processing scheme, adaptive morphological update lifting wavelet (AMULW), for rolling element bearing fault detection. In contrast with the widely used morphological wavelet, the filters in AMULW are no longer fixed. Instead, the AMULW adaptively uses a morphological dilation-erosion filter or an average filter as the update lifting filter to modify the approximation signal. Moreover, the nonlinear morphological filter is utilized to substitute the traditional linear filter in AMULW. The effectiveness of the proposed AMULW is evaluated using a simulated vibration signal and experimental vibration signals collected from a bearing test rig. Results show that the proposed method has a superior performance in extracting fault features of defective rolling element bearings.