Faults diagnosis of rolling element bearings based on modified morphological method

In order to effectively smooth noise and extract the impulse components in the vibration signals of defective rolling element bearings, a new modified morphology analytical method has been proposed. In this method, average of the closing and opening operator has been used as the morphology operator. Being the flat and zero adopted as the shape and the height of structure element (SE), respectively, the optimized length of SE is defined by a new proposed criterion (called SNR criterion). The effect of the new method is validated by both simulated impulsive signal and vibration signal of three defective rolling bearings with an outer, an inner and a rolling element faults and compared with Nikolaou's method. The result shows that the proposed method has the superior performance in extracting impulsive characteristics of vibration signals, especially for the high level noise signals, and can implement better in diagnosis of defective rolling element bearing. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.