Skewness as an objective function for vibration analysis of rolling element bearings

The scale invariant third order moment, skewness, is analysed as an objective function to an adaptive gradient ascent algorithm. The purpose is to achieve a spectrum at the filter output that can enable identification of possible bearing defect signatures which are impulsive and periodic. Harmonically related sinusoids are used to represent such signatures and to build a signal model allowing characterization of the objective surface of skewness, providing insight to its convergent behaviour. The results are supported with an experiment from an industry setting. Robustness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by examining the frequency spectrum resulting from the signal model.