A Two-Stage Data-Driven-Based Prognostic Approach for Bearing Degradation Problem

Prognostics of the remaining useful life (RUL) has emerged as a critical technique for ensuring the safety, availability, and efficiency of a complex system. To gain a better prognostic result, degradation information is quite useful because it can reflect the health status of a system. However, due to the lack of accurate information about the plants’ degradation, the prognostic model is usually not well established. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a two-stage strategy that is in the context of data-driven modeling to predict the future health status of a bearing, where the degradation information was estimated by calculating the deviation of multiple statistics of vibration signals of a bearing from a known healthy state. Then, a prediction stage based on an enhanced Kalman filter and an expectation–maximization algorithm were used to estimate the RUL of the bearing adaptively. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a real-bearing degradation problem was implemented.