Maximum negative entropy deconvolution and its application to bearing condition monitoring

Blind deconvolution (BD) has proven to be an effective approach to detecting repetitive transients caused by bearing faults. However, BD suffers from instability issues including excessive sensitivity of kurtosis-guided BD methods to the single impulse and high computational time cost of the eigenvector algorithm-aided BD methods. To address these critical issues, this paper proposed a novel BD method maximizing negative entropy (NE), shortened as maximum negative entropy deconvolution (MNED). MNED utilizes NE instead of kurtosis as the optimization metric and optimizes the filter coefficients through the objective function method. The effectiveness of MNED in enhancing repetitive transients is illustrated through a simulation case and two experimental cases. A quantitative comparison with three existing BD methods demonstrates the advantages of MNED in fault detection and computational efficiency. In addition, the performance of the four methods under different filter lengths and external shocks is compared. MNED exhibits lower sensitivity to random impulse noise than the kurtosis-guided BD methods and higher computational efficiency than the BD methods based on the eigenvalue algorithm. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that MNED is a robust and cost-effective method for bearing fault diagnosis and condition monitoring.