Experimental Investigation of the Diagnosis of Angular Contact Ball Bearings Using Acoustic Emission Method and Empirical Mode Decomposition

Early detection of angular contact bearings, one of the important subsets of rolling element bearings (REBs), is critical for applications of high accuracy and high speed performance. In this study, acoustic emission (AE) method was applied to an experimental case with defects on angular contact bearing. AE signals were collected by AE sensors in different operating conditions. Signal to noise ratio (SNR) was calculated by kurtosis to entropy ratio (KER), then acquired signals were denoised by empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method, and optimal intrinsic mode function (IMF) was selected by the proposed method. Finally, envelope spectrum was applied to the denoised signals, and frequencies of defects were obtained in different rotating speeds, loadings, and defect sizes. For the first time, a small defect with width of 0.3 mm and loading of 475 N was detected in early stage of 0.04 KHz. Moreover, a comparison between theoretical and extracted defect frequencies suggested that our method successfully detected localized defects in both inner and outer race. Our results show promise in detecting small size defects in REBs.