Incipient fault feature extraction of rolling element bearings based on SOSO boosting technique and improved energy operator

Abstract The incipient fault features of rolling element bearings (REBs) are easily overwhelmed by environmental noise and vibration interference. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel fault feature extraction method for REBs based on a SOSO (Strengthen-Operate denoising-Subtract-Strengthen) boosting technique. Firstly, an improved fast non-local mean filtering (IFNLM) algorithm is proposed by improving the similarity measure and kernel function while reducing the amount of weight calculation based on distance symmetry. Secondly, a SOSO_IFNLM boosting filtering structure is constructed to reduce the noise of the original vibration signal and enhance the early faint fault pulse. Finally, a k-value improved symmetric higher-order frequency-weighted energy operator (k-SHFWEO) is proposed to detect the bearing fault features from denoised signals. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed SOSO_IFNLM-k-SHFWEO method are numerically and experimentally investigated. The results demonstrate that the proposed method has better fault feature extraction capability for early weak faults of REBs and higher efficiency compared to other popular methods.