Sparse maximum harmonics-to-noise-ratio deconvolution for weak fault signature detection in bearings

De-noising and enhancement of the weak fault signature from the noisy signal are crucial for fault diagnosis, as features are often very weak and masked by the background noise. Deconvolution methods have a significant advantage in counteracting the influence of the transmission path and enhancing the fault impulses. However, the performance of traditional deconvolution methods is greatly affected by some limitations, which restrict the application range. Therefore, this paper proposes a new deconvolution method, named sparse maximum harmonics-noise-ratio deconvolution (SMHD), that employs a novel index, the harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), to be the objective function for iteratively choosing the optimum filter coefficients to maximize HNR. SMHD is designed to enhance latent periodic impulse faults from heavy noise signals by calculating the HNR to estimate the period. A sparse factor is utilized to further suppress the noise and improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the filtered signal in every iteration step. In addition, the updating process of the sparse threshold value and the period guarantees the robustness of SMHD. On this basis, the new method not only overcomes the limitations associated with traditional deconvolution methods, minimum entropy deconvolution (MED) and maximum correlated kurtosis deconvolution (MCKD), but visual inspection is also better, even if the fault period is not provided in advance. Moreover, the efficiency of the proposed method is verified by simulations and bearing data from different test rigs. The results show that the proposed method is effective in the detection of various bearing faults compared with the original MED and MCKD.