LAUSR

The fault response signals of an axle-box bearing of a rail vehicle have strongly non-linear and non-stationary characteristics, which can reflect the operating state of the running gears. This paper proposes a novel method for bearing fault diagnosis based on frequency-domain energy feature reconstruction (EFR) and composite multiscale permutation entropy (CMPE). First, a wavelet packet transform (WPT) is applied to decompose the vibration signals into multiple frequency bands. Then, considering that the bearing-localized defects cause the axle-box bearing system to resonate at a high frequency, which will lead to uneven energy distribution of the signal in the frequency domain, the energy factors of each frequency band are calculated by an energy feature extraction algorithm, from which the frequency band with maximum energy factor (which contains abundant fault information) is reconstructed to the time-domain signal. Next, the complexity of the reconstructed signals is calculated by CMPE as fault feature vectors. Finally, the feature vectors are input into a medium Gaussian support vector machine (MG-SVM) for bearing condition classification. The proposed method is validated by a public bearing data set and a wheelset-bearing system test bench data set. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can effectively extract bearing fault features and provides a new solution for condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of rail vehicle axle-box bearings.