Identification of Faulty Ball Bearings Using Singular Value Ratio: A Case Study.

This work investigates the possibility of using the ratio of singular value for bearing fault detection. The existing simple time domain methods are affected by variation of sample points. Also, they have not been shown to be effective in presence of noise. The present work overcomes the above issues. Singular value decomposition of the bearing vibration signal is obtained under healthy and different fault conditions. The dominant singular values are selected based on the singular value plot. The ratio of these singular values is used as fault index which is found to be having a constant value for faulty bearing and another range of values for healthy bearing. The method is tested with experimental data obtained for different bearing fault types, with increasing fault severity and at various load. The effect of load, fault size, sample points and noise are studied on the fault index. The advantages of the proposed method are shown in comparison with the existing simple time domain techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]