Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Bearing with Vibration Signals Based on a Novel Indicator

Aiming at reducing the production downtime and maintenance cost, prognostics and health management (PHM) of rotating machinery often includes the remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of bearings. In this paper, a method combining the generalized Weibull failure rate function (WFRF) and radial basis function (RBF) neural network is developed to deal with the RUL prediction of bearings. A novel indicator, namely, the power value on the sensitive frequency band (SFB), is proposed to track bearing degradation process. Generalized WFRF is used to fit the degradation indicator series to reduce the effect of noise and avoid areas of fluctuation in the time domain. RBF neural network is employed to predict the RUL of bearings with times and fitted power values at present and previous inspections as input. Meanwhile, the life percentage is selected as output. The performance of the proposed method is validated by an accelerated bearing run-to-failure experiment, and the results demonstrate the advantage of this method in achieving more accurate RUL prediction.