A novel rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on marginal spectrum

Fault diagnosis is an important method for maintaining the stable and safe running state of mechanical equipment. As most mechanical equipment faults are induced by the bearing assembly, bearing fault diagnosis is of considerable importance. At present, the mainstream intelligent diagnostic techniques include supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Supervised learning requires manual labeling and data classification, which is unfavorable for massive data amounts. Therefore, how to effectively use labeled data to increase the accuracy of diagnosis is critical, especially when the bearing failure cannot be labeled at the very beginning. This paper proposes a time–frequency analysis of the short-time Fourier transform and wavelet transform methods based on unsupervised learning. The time axis was integrated to obtain the marginal frequency of two frequency domains as a diagnostic feature, and then two clustering centroids were established automatically by the K-means of unsupervised learning. The signals were divided into two classes based on the nearest clustering centroid as the criteria for diagnosis. Finally, other bearings in different positions were classified and diagnosed using the nearest clustering centroid in the same experiment to verify the effectiveness of the method proposed in this study.