Early Prediction of Remaining Useful Life for Rolling Bearings Based on Envelope Spectral Indicator and Bayesian Filter

On top of the condition-based maintenance (CBM) practice for rotating machinery, the robust estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) for rolling-element bearings (REB) is of particular interest. The failure of a single bearing often results in secondary defects in the connected structure and catastrophic system failures. The prediction of RUL facilitates proactive maintenance planning to ensure system reliability and minimize financial loss due to unscheduled downtime. In this paper, to acquire early and reliable estimations of useful life, the RUL prediction of REBs is formulated into nonlinear degradation state estimation tackled by the combination of the envelope spectral indicator (ESI) and extended Kalman filter (EKF). By fusing the spectral energy of the bearing fault characteristic frequencies (FCFs) in the averaged envelope spectrum, the ESI is crafted to remove the interference from rotor-dynamics and reveal the bearing deterioration process. Once the fault is identified, the recursive Bayesian method based on EKF is utilized for estimating the bearing end-of-life time via the exponential state-space model. The distinctive advantage of the proposed approach lies in its ability to make an early prediction of RUL using a small number of ESI observations, offering an efficient practice for predictive health management at the early stage of bearing fault. The performance of the proposed method is validated using publicly available experimental bearing vibration data across three different operating conditions.