A Fault Diagnosis Method for Rolling Bearings Based on Feature Fusion of Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis and Alpha Stable Distribution

When rolling bearings fail, it is usually difficult to determine the degree of damage. To address this problem, a new fault diagnosis method was developed to perform feature extraction and intelligent classification of various fault position and damage degree of rolling bearing signals. Firstly, Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA) was used to compute five MFDFA features while five Alpha Stable Distribution (ASD) features were obtained by fitting the distribution to the vibration signals of each status and calculating the Probability Density Function (PDF). Secondly, Kernel Principle Component Analysis (KPCA) was used to achieve dimensionality reduction fusion of the combination of original features to gain the Kernel Principle Component Fusion Features (KPCFFs). Thirdly, the KPCFFs served as the input of Least Squares Support Vectors Machine (LSSVM) based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to assess rolling bearings’ fault position and damage severity. Finally, the effectiveness of the method was validated by bench test data. The results demonstrated that the developed method can achieve intelligent diagnosis of rolling bearings’ fault position and damage degree and can yield better diagnosis accuracy than single feature method or corresponding single feature fusion method.