A New Method to Detect Inner/Outer Race Bearing Fault Using Discrete Wavelet Transform in Frequency-Domain

Induction motors' faults detection is almost a popular topic among researchers. Monitoring the output of motors is a key factor in detecting these faults. (Short-time) Fourier, (continuous, discrete) wavelet, and extended Park vector transformations are among the methods for fault detection. One major deficiency of these methods is not being able to detect the severity of faults that carry low energy information, e.g. in ball bearing system failure, there is absolutely no way to detect the severity of fault using Fourier or wavelet transformations. In this paper, the authors have applied the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) frequency-domain analysis to detect bearing faults in an induction motor. In other words, in discrete transform which the output signal is decomposed in several steps and frequency resolution increases considerably, the frequency-band analysis is performed and it will be verified that first of all, fault sidebands become more recognizable for detection in higher levels of decomposition, and secondly, the inner race bearing faults turn out easier in these levels; and all these matter because of eliminating the not-required high energy components in lower levels of decomposing.