A Novel Clustering Method Combining ART with Yu’s Norm for Fault Diagnosis of Bearings

Clustering methods have been widely applied to the fault diagnosis of mechanical system, but the characteristic that the number of cluster needs to be determined in advance limits the application range of the method. In this paper, a novel clustering method combining the adaptive resonance theory (ART) with the similarity measure based on the Yu’s norm is presented and applied to the fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings, which can be adaptive to generate the number of cluster by the vigilance parameter test. Time-domain features, frequency-domain features, and time series model parameters are extracted to demonstrate the fault-related information about the bearings, and then considering the irrelevance or redundancy of some features many salient features are selected by an improved distance discriminant technique and input into the proposed clustering method to diagnose the faults of bearings. The experiment results confirmed that the proposed clustering method can diagnose the fault categories accurately and has better diagnosis performance compared with fuzzy ART and Self-Organizing Feature Map (SOFM).