A Fault Diagnosis Scheme for Rolling Bearing Based on Particle Swarm Optimization in Variational Mode Decomposition

Variational mode decomposition (VMD) is a new method of signal adaptive decomposition. In the VMD framework, the vibration signal is decomposed into multiple mode components by Wiener filtering in Fourier domain, and the center frequency of each mode component is updated as the center of gravity of the mode’s power spectrum. Therefore, each decomposed mode is compact around a center pulsation and has a limited bandwidth. In view of the situation that the penalty parameter and the number of components affect the decomposition effect in VMD algorithm, a novel method of fault feature extraction based on the combination of VMD and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed. In this paper, the numerical simulation and the measured fault signals of the rolling bearing experiment system are analyzed by the proposed method. The results indicate that the proposed method is much more robust to sampling and noise. Additionally, the proposed method has an advantage over the EMD in complicated signal decomposition and can be utilized as a potential method in extracting the faint fault information of rolling bearings compared with the common method of envelope spectrum analysis.