On Quantification of Bearing Damage for Lifecycle Prognostics

Over the past years, investigation on bearing prognostics using HUMS condition indicators has been conducted. A key to the success of using HUMS vibration data for bearing lifecycle prognostics is a quantified relationship between bearing damage and HUMS condition indicators. To establish such a quantitative relationship, condition indicators extracted from vibration signals by effective signal processing techniques are used. Envelope analysis is one of the most effective methods among all. However, one challenge in applying envelope analysis is to properly designate a bandpass filter through which a complete mode of vibration could be filtered. If a bandpass filter cannot be properly designated, the envelope signal will not be sensitive to the fault and the resulting condition indicators will be ineffective for bearing damage quantification and lifecycle prognostics. In this paper, a new efficient method based on high frequency resonance technique using first vibration mode for extracting condition indicators for bearing damage quantification and bearing lifecycle prognostics applications is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with real bearing run-to-failure test data.