Abstract
Compound faults often occur in rotating machinery, which increases the difficulty of fault diagnosis. In this case, blind source separation, which usually includes independent component analysis (ICA) and sparse component analysis (SCA), was proposed to separate mixed signals. SCA, which is based on the sparsity of target signals, was developed to sever the compound faults and effectively diagnose the fault due to its advantage over ICA in underdetermined conditions. However, there is an issue regarding the vibration signals, which are inadequately sparse, and it is difficult to represent them in a sparse way. Accordingly, to overcome the above-mentioned problem, a sparsity-promoted approach named wavelet modulus maxima is applied to obtain the sparse observation signal. Then, the potential function is utilized to estimate the number of source signals and the mixed matrix based on the sparse signal. Finally, the separation of the source signals can be achieved according to the shortest path method. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the simulated signals and vibration signals measured from faulty roller bearings are used. The faults that occur in a roller bearing are the outer-race flaw, the inner-race flaw and the rolling element flaw. The results show that the fault features acquired using the proposed approach are evidently close to the theoretical values. For instance, the inner-race feature frequency 101.3 Hz is very similar to the theoretical calculation 101 Hz. Therefore, it is effective to achieve the separation of compound faults utilizing the suggest method, even in underdetermined cases. In addition, a comparison is applied to prove that the proposed method outperforms the traditional SCA method when the vibration signals are inadequate.