Wei He 1, Qiang Miao 2, Michael Azarian 1, and Michael Pecht 1
1School of Mechanical, Electronic and Industrial Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 611731, People׳s Republic of China
2CALCE, Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20740, USA
Abstract:
In this paper, a vibration-based health monitoring approach for cooling fans is proposed using a wavelet filter for early detection of faults in fan bearings and for the assessment of fault severity. To match the wavelet filter to the fault characteristic signal, a fuzzy rule is introduced to maximize the amplitudes of bearing characteristic frequencies (BCFs), which are an indicator of bearing faults. The sum of the amplitudes of BCFs and their harmonics (SABCF) is used as an index to capture the bearing degradation trend. A comparative study is conducted with commonly used time-domain indices in the degradation assessment, and performance is quantified by three measures, i.e., monotonicity, prognosability, and trendability. The analysis results of the experimental data show that the proposed method can effectively detect incipient defects and can better capture the degradation trend of fan bearings than traditional time-domain indices in vibration analysis.