A new blind fault component separation algorithm for a single-channel mechanical signal mixture

A vibration signal collected from a complex machine consists of multiple vibration components, which are system responses excited by several sources. This paper reports a new blind component separation (BCS) method for extracting different mechanical fault features. By applying the proposed method, a single-channel mixed signal can be decomposed into two parts: the periodic and transient subsets. The periodic subset is related to the imbalance, misalignment and eccentricity of a machine. The transient subset refers to abnormal impulsive phenomena, such as those caused by localized bearing faults. The proposed method includes two individual strategies to deal with these different characteristics. The first extracts the sub-Gaussian periodic signal by minimizing the kurtosis of the equalized signals. The second detects the super-Gaussian transient signal by minimizing the smoothness index of the equalized signals. Here, the equalized signals are derived by an eigenvector algorithm that is a successful solution to the blind equalization problem. To reduce the computing time needed to select the equalizer length, a simple optimization method is introduced to minimize the kurtosis and smoothness index, respectively. Finally, simulated multiple-fault signals and a real multiple-fault signal collected from an industrial machine are used to validate the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method is able to effectively decompose the multiple-fault vibration mixture into periodic components and random non-stationary transient components. In addition, the equalizer length can be intelligently determined using the proposed method.