Kurtosis over Energy Distribution Approach for STFT Enhancement in Ball Bearing Diagnostics

This paper focuses on the diagnostics of ball bearings under time varying speed conditions. Compared to classical demodulation techniques, time-frequency approach allows to take into account transient occurrence or non-stationary phenomena along the timeline. Among the different time-frequency approaches available the simplest is the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT). From a practical point of view, its implementation in an industrial environment has a main drawback: the industry usually needs a scalar value as output (like a semaphore: green, yellow and red light) to assess the bearing condition, while time-frequency approaches produce a bi-dimensional map that needs to be interpreted. The authors suggest to combine the information gathered by spectral kurtosis and energy distribution for the automatic selection of a filtering band that could extract from the STFT map the most informative component in time domain, reducing the complexity of the output to a mono-dimensional vector. A simple check if the output exceed a given threshold can then be used to obtain a scalar value