Selection of the Informative Frequency Band in a Bearing Fault Diagnosis in the Presence of Non-Gaussian Noise—Comparison of Recently Developed Methods

The vibration signals acquired on machines usually have complex spectral structure. As the signal of interest (SOI) is weak (especially at an early stage of damage) and covers some frequency range (around structural resonance), it requires its extraction from a raw observation. Until now, most of the techniques assumed the presence of Gaussian noise. Unfortunately, there are cases when the non-informative part of the signal (considered as the noise) is non-Gaussian due to the random disturbances or nature of the process executed by the machine. Thus, the problem can be formulated as the extraction of the SOI from the non-Gaussian noise. Recently this problem has been recognized by several authors and some new ideas have been developed. In this paper, we would like to compare these techniques for benchmark signals (Gaussian noise, cyclic impulsive signals, non-cyclic impulsive signals with random amplitudes and locations of impulses and a mixture of all of them). Our analysis will cover spectral kurtosis, kurtogram, stability index (Alpha selector), conditional variance-based selector, spectral Gini index, spectral smoothness index and infogram. Finally, a discussion on the efficiency of each method is provided.