RMS Based Health Indicators for Remaining Useful Lifetime Estimation of Bearings

Abstract

Estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings from healthy to faulty is important for predictive maintenance. The bearing fault severity can be estimated based on the energy or root mean square (RMS) of vibration signals, and a stopping criterion can be set based on a threshold given by an ISO standard. However, the vibration RMS is often not monotonically increasing with damage, which renders a challenge for predicting the RUL. This study proposes a novel method for splitting the vibration signal into multiple frequency bands before RMS calculations to generate multiple health indicators. Monotonic health indicators are identified using the Spearman coefficient, and the RUL is afterward estimated for each indicator using a suitable model and parameter update scheme. Historical failure data is not required to set any parameters. The proposed method is tested with the Paris' law, where parameters are updated by particle filters. Experimental results from two test rigs validate the performance of the proposed method.