Cooling fan bearing fault identification using vibration measurement

As a commonly used assembly in computer cooling systems, the normal operation of a cooling fan is critical for guaranteeing system stability and reducing damage to electronic components. Reliability analyses have shown that fan bearing failure is a major failure mode. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct research on fault detection of cooling fan bearings. In this paper we propose vibration-based fan bearing fault detection through the wavelet transform and the Hilbert transform. An experiment on fan bearings was conducted to collect vibration data for the validation of our proposed method. The analysis results show that the proposed method can identify different bearing faults.