A hybrid method for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings

Traditional diagnostic methods often have insufficient accuracy and noise reduction, which leads to diagnostic errors. To address these issues, this paper proposes an advanced fault diagnosis model that combines the variational mode decomposition (VMD) improved by a Variable-Objective Search Whale Optimization Algorithm (VSWOA) with a Pelican Optimization (PO)-boosted Kernel Extreme Learning Machine (KELM) algorithm. The application of the method is shown here in the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. The proposed VSWOA enhances the performance of VMD by incorporating a Sobol sequence, nonlinear time-varying factors, a multi-objective initial search strategy, and an elite Cauchy chaos mutation strategy, significantly improving noise reduction in vibration signals. Fault information is precisely extracted using waveform factors, sample entropy, and advanced composite multiscale fuzzy entropy, which enables effective feature screening and dimensionality reduction. The POA fine-tunes the KELM parameters, increasing the classification accuracy. The effectiveness of the model is verified through experimental evaluations using bearing data with injected Gaussian noise (from Case Western Reserve University) and the SpectraQuest datasets, where significant improvements in noise reduction and fault detection accuracy are achieved.