Localization of Rolling Element Faults Using Improved Binary Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Feature Selection Task

The accurate localization of the rolling element failure is very important to ensure the reliability of rotating machinery. This paper proposes an efficient and anti-noise fault diagnosis model for rolling elements. The proposed model is composed of feature extraction, feature selection and fault classification. Feature extraction is composed of signal processing and signal noise reduction. Signal processing is carried out by local mean decomposition (LMD), and signal noise reduction is performed by product function (PF) selection and wavelet packet decomposition (WPD). Through the steps of signal noise reduction, high-frequency noise can be effectively removed, and the fault information hidden under the noise can be extracted. To further improve the effectiveness of the diagnostic model, an improved binary particle swarm optimization (IBPSO) is proposed to find the most important features from the feature space. In IBPSO, cycling time-varying inertia weight is introduced to balance exploitation and exploration and improve the capability to escape from local solutions, and crossover and mutation operations are also introduced to improve exploration and exploitation capabilities, respectively. The main contributions of this research are briefly described as follows: (1) The feature extraction process applied in this research can effectively remove noise and establish a high-accuracy feature set. (2) The proposed feature selection algorithm has higher accuracy than the other state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms. (3) In a strong noise environment, the proposed rolling element fault diagnosis model is compared with the state-of-the-art fault diagnosis model in terms of classification accuracy. Experimental results show that the model can maintain high classification accuracy in a strong noise environment. Therefore, it can be proved that the fault diagnosis model proposed in this paper can be effectively applied to the fault diagnosis of rotating machinery.