A new morphological method for faults diagnosis of rolling element bearings

A new morphology analysis method had been proposed to effectively extract the impulse components in the vibration signals of defective rolling element bearings. In the method, the morphology operator had been constructed by average of the closing and opening operator. For the construction of structure element (SE), the flat and zero was adopted as the shape and the height of SE, respectively, and the element numbers of the SE was optimized by a new proposed criterion (called SNR criterion). Vibration signals of two defective rolling bearings with an outer and an inner fault respectively are employed to validate the proposed method and the results are compared with ones calculated by envelopment analysis method. It shows that the proposed method is effective and robust to extract morphological features, and can be used to the on-line diagnostics of rolling element bearings in rotating machines conveniently.