Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ymssp

SVD and Hankel matrix based de-noising approach for ball

bearing fault detection and its assessment using
artificial faults
Reza Golafshan n, Kenan Yuce Sanliturk
Istanbul Technical University, Mechanical Engineering Department, 34437 Istanbul, Turkey

a r t i c l e in f o abstract

Article history: Ball bearings remain one of the most crucial components in industrial machines and due
Received 21 April 2015 to their critical role, it is of great importance to monitor their conditions under operation.
Received in revised form However, due to the background noise in acquired signals, it is not always possible to
22 July 2015
identify probable faults. This incapability in identifying the faults makes the de-noising
Accepted 12 August 2015
process one of the most essential steps in the field of Condition Monitoring (CM) and fault
Available online 8 September 2015
detection. In the present study, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Hankel matrix
Keywords: based de-noising process is successfully applied to the ball bearing time domain vibration
Ball bearing fault detection signals as well as to their spectrums for the elimination of the background noise and the
De-noising
improvement the reliability of the fault detection process. The test cases conducted using
Singular value decomposition
experimental as well as the simulated vibration signals demonstrate the effectiveness of
Time domain analysis
Frequency domain analysis the proposed de-noising approach for the ball bearing fault detection.
& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Ball bearings are one of the most common and important components in many mechanical engineering applications. It is
well-known that ball bearings have a very significant role on the global vibrations of a rotating machinery. Therefore,
vibration-based fault detection and diagnosis of the ball bearings have become a vigorous area of work and have appealed
more and more attention in the literature [1–4]. Recently, some of the ball bearing diagnosis research works are focused on
the non-stationary conditions due to variable load and rotating speed, such as during machine run-up and run-down [5–7].
However, due to the unavoidable noise in measured data, it is not always possible to identify probable faults and this could
be the case in many ball bearing vibration analyses [8,9]. Consequently, de-noising appears to be one of the most important
steps in the field of Condition Monitoring (CM) and fault detection based on vibration analyses [9,10].
When a localized defect occurs on ball bearing surfaces, a series of impulses are created in vibration signal of a ball
bearing. These impulses excite the resonances of the system with a certain repetition frequency. The resonance frequency of
the inner or outer rings of the ball bearing system excited by local faults generally exceeds 1.5 kHz; however, the resonance
frequency is usually not of interest since it does not have explicit diagnostic information. A desirable and successful
diagnostic method should be able to detect the corresponding repetition frequency of the impulse train [1]. As mentioned,
since impulses can be concealed by unavoidable noise, it can adversely affect the efficiency of ball bearing diagnosis

n
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: reza.golafshan@itu.edu.tr (R. Golafshan).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ymssp.2015.08.012
0888-3270/& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50 37

methods. In particular, in industrial environments, vibration signals can be covered with heavy background noise
originating from measurement system as well as due to misalignment, unbalance, crack(s) on the rotating shaft, looseness,
and distortions [8].
Among a wide range of de-noising and signal enhancing methods available in the literature [10,11,12], noise elimination
algorithms based on SVD are considerably faster and easier to implement. However, it appears that SVD-based methods are
mostly used in order to extract statistical parameters which can be used for characterizing the vibration signals captured
from ball bearings [14–17]. SVD-based feature extraction method or Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) enables a suitable
opportunity to monitor the singular values obtained from vibration signals at different operation conditions. SSA procedure
can be performed in 3 main steps namely embedding, SVD process, and post-processing [18]. In embedding step, the input
signal in vector form is turned into a matrix form by using sub-vectors obtained by means of a sliding window over the data
points. These sub-vectors form a so-called trajectory matrix. The next step is to apply SVD to the trajectory matrix to obtain
the singular values. The size of the trajectory matrix (i.e. Hankel matrix) depends on the length of the sliding window which
affects the quantity of the information that can be extracted from this matrix [16]. In post-processing step, the fact that the
defective ball bearings generate high singular values compared to the healthy ones in SVD process [15] is used to assess the
condition of the corresponding ball bearing. Wang et al. in [19] are the first who employed SSA for the diagnosis of rotating
machinery failures through vibration signals. It should be noted that, instead of the first step so-called embedding based on
time domain signals, other methods such as Hilbert–Huang Transform [20,21] which produces decomposed signals in
various sub-bands and Winger-distribution matrix in time–frequency domain [22] can also be used as input matrix to the
SVD process. Some research works have been published to optimize the efficiency of the feature extraction ability of the SSA
for the case of the ball bearing vibration signals [23]. Since SSA produces statistical parameters related to the condition of
the corresponding machine, it has the capability to combine with the intelligent fault diagnosis techniques such as Artificial
Neural Network (ANN) [15] and advanced fault classification and categorization methods such as Support Vector Machine
(SVM) [14] and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) [24].
The available SVD-based de-noising methods are based on finding an appropriate threshold to reconstruct a lower rank
matrix for post-processing purposes. Jiang et al. in [25] have employed SVD for the coefficient matrix of the Reassignment
Continuous Wavelet Transform (RCWT) to obtain the de-noised and sharper time–frequency representation of the vibration
signal. Chen and Zhang in [26] have formed the input matrix in SVD process based on a series of experiments so that each
row is formed by repeating the tests using the same ball bearings. However, the major difficulty with this method is that it
requires conducting so many experiments which is a key factor to yield successful results. Sanliturk and Cakar in [27] have
proposed an effective method for de-noising based on SVD of Hankel matrix of Frequency Response Function (FRF) and its
time domain counterpart, Impulse Response Function (IRF).
In the present study, the de-noising effects of SVD-based method on ball bearing fault detection have been investigated
in some detail in time and frequency domains. First, the formulations and theoretical basis of the SVD-based de-noising
method are given in Section 2. Then, the test rig is described and the SVD-based de-noising method for fault detection is
applied to the measured data corresponding to artificially made faults with various sizes of ball bearing in Section 3. Finally,
some concluding remarks are made about the effectiveness of the SVD-based noise elimination approach for the ball bearing
fault detection.

2. SVD-based de-noising method: theory

SVD is a numerical method which states that a matrix [A] of rank L can be decomposed into the product of three
matrices, [U] (an orthogonal matrix), [S] (a diagonal matrix), and [V]T (the transpose of an orthogonal matrix [V]). This
method is usually presented as [28]

½Amn ¼ ½Umm ½Smn ½VTnn ð1Þ

T T T
where U U ¼I and V V ¼I; S is a diagonal matrix containing the square roots of eigenvalues of A A, which can be expressed
as S¼diag(σ1, σ2, …, σL), where L ¼min(m,n). These σi (i ¼1, 2, …, L) are called the singular values of the matrix [A].
The method presented in [29] offers a possibility to find the best approximation of the original data points using fewer
dimensions by SVD. Therefore, it can be used as a process for data reduction and this makes the SVD a useful tool for de-
noising of vibration signals. There exists a m  n matrix ½A of rank l rL, which minimizes the sum of the squared error
between the elements of the matrix [A] and the corresponding elements of the matrix ½A which can be formed as
h i
A ¼ ½Ul ½Sl ½Vl T ð2Þ
h i
where A is the reconstructed matrix using only the largest l number of singular values. The rest of the singular values are
replaced by zero such that
σi 4 ε; i ¼ 1; …; l
σi r ε; i ¼ l þ 1; …; L ð3Þ

where ε is threshold.
38 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50

A typical faulty ball bearing vibration signal, x(k), can be modeled as [30]
xðkÞ ¼ yðkÞ þnðkÞ ð4Þ
where yðkÞ and nðkÞ are uncontaminated part and noise, respectively. Consequently, matrix [A] related to x(k), comprises
two parts: uncontaminated data (matrix ½A) which contains fault diagnosis information and unwanted part (matrix [N])
which represents noise. From Eqs. (1) and (2), the following equation can also be derived
" #" T #
h i   Sl 0 Vl
½A ¼ A þ ½N ¼ U l U 0 ð5Þ
0 S0 VT0
h i
where A and [N] are correspond to y(k) and n(k), respectively. Also Sl contains significant singular values σi (i ¼1, 2, …, l)
which are used to construct the uncontaminated data and S0 contains small singular values σi (i ¼l þ1, …, L).
In practice, the measured signals are mostly vectors rather than matrices. In the literature, some methods have been
proposed for forming the matrix [A] using measured data [20,26]. In the present study, the Hankel matrix is employed for
signal de-noising in time and frequency domain analyses. Then, the main problem with the use of SVD in signal processing is
the estimation of the noise threshold to separate the unwanted and uncontaminated parts of the data. According to the
study by Sanliturk and Cakar in [27], for any given data with a sample number of N, a square or a nearly square Hankel
matrix can be constructed. However, it is neither necessary nor desirable to construct a square or nearly square Hankel
matrix for de-noising applications. Instead, a rectangular matrix with appropriate selection of the smaller dimension can be
used effectively, provided that the smaller dimension, i.e. the maximum possible rank, is large enough to represent the
system behavior including the effect of noise. In what follows, noise elimination using SVD are described in both time and
frequency domains.

2.1. Time domain analysis

The Hankel matrix for an input discrete vibration signal, xi (i¼ 1, 2, …, N) can be obtained by sliding a window having
length of m over the corresponding vector and can be written as [31]
2 3
x1 x2 … xn
6 7
6 x2 x3 ⋯ xn þ 1 7
6 7
½A ¼ 6 ð6Þ
6 ⋮ ⋮ ⋱ ⋮ 7 7
4 5
xm xm þ 1 ⋯ xN

where m þn  1 ¼ N.
The Hankel matrix in Eq. (6) is used in Eq. (1) for singular value decomposition. One way to determine the noise
threshold and the first l singular values in Eq. (5) is to plot the normalized singular values and to choose the appropriate
rank when the normalized singular values approach to an asymptote [32], which is also adopted in [27]. In addition, from
ball bearing fault detection point of view, the most appropriate time domain signals are those of highest impulsive nature.
Accordingly, one of the most reliable ways to quantify the impulsive feature of a signal is via the use of kurtosis which can be
expressed as
R þ1
½x  μ4 pðxÞdx
K ¼ 1 ð7Þ
4σ
where K, p(x), σ, and μ are kurtosis value, Probability Density Function (PDF), standard deviation, and the mean value of the
time domain signal, respectively.
After the matrix ½A related to the first l singular values are obtained, it must be converted to the vector form. The
reconstruction procedure is done by arithmetic averaging along the anti-diagonals of the matrix ½A [27]. This method is also
known as diagonal averaging method in [33,15] and can be expressed as
β
X
1
xi ¼ Ai  j þ 1; j ð8Þ
βαþ1 j ¼ α
where α ¼ maxð1; i  m þ1Þ and β ¼ minðn; iÞ. Note that, the vector, x, is the de-noised time domain vibration signal with
the higher kurtosis value compared to that of the original signal.
It should be noted that obtaining the probable highest kurtosis value in SVD-based de-noising process needs some
iterations between Eq. (2) and Eq. (8) by including different numbers singular values for the reconstruction of the de-noised
signal, but this is not considered as a significant drawback.
The vibration signal model in Eq. (4) with three different SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) values is used to examine the
boundaries of the SVD-based noise elimination method. For each noisy signal, a Hankel matrix with 1000 rows is formed
(number of rows being smaller than the number of columns). Then, by eliminating the non-important singular values, the
de-noised vibration signals are reconstructed. The original and the de-noised simulated vibration signals are shown in Fig. 1.
The envelope analysis is performed on the de-noised vibration signals and the results are presented in Fig. 2. The results,
 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50 39

20 20

0 0

-20 -20
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5

60 20
Amplitude [m/s ]

Amplitude [m/s ]
2

2
0 0

-60 -20
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5

160 20

0 0

-160 -20
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5
Time [s] Time [s]
Fig. 1. Left: simulated faulty ball bearing vibration signals with SNR (a) 1 (b) 0.1 (c) 0.01; right: corresponding SVD-based de-noised simulated vibration
signals in d, e, f, respectively.

1
0.9 SNR=1
SNR = 0.1
0.8 SNR = 0.01

0.7
Magnitude

0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
Frequency [Hz]

Fig. 2. Envelope spectrums of the SVD-based de-noised simulated faulty vibration signals in Fig. 1.

including those not presented here, suggest that the proposed de-noising method is capable of detecting the fault frequency
if the SNR of a signal is higher than 0.01.

2.2. Frequency domain analysis

When there is a local fault on one of the raceways of a ball bearing, passing roller elements (balls) over the local fault
creates pulses at one of the fundamental fault frequencies (BPFO or BPFI, depend on whether the fault is on outer or inner
raceways) and the spectrum of the vibration signal contains this fault frequency and its harmonics. On the other hand, if
there is a local fault on the rolling elements (balls), the local fault creates impacts on both inner and outer raceways.
Therefore, a frequency close to 2  BSF (Ball Spin Frequency) appears in the spectrum. In many cases, this frequency is
modulated with BPFO or BPFI. Consequently, a very complex frequency spectrum may result in from this process. In
addition, a captured raw ball bearing vibration signal certainly contains some background noise due to environmental
conditions and it frequently makes interpretations of the spectrum quite complex. As a result, some de-noising processes is
40 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50

strongly recommended in the literature in order to get a smoother spectrum which can be used to extract diagnostic
information.
In this section, the same de-noising strategy used in the previous section is also utilized for the noise removal from a
frequency spectrum obtained from the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). Fourier series components of a discrete vibration
signal, xi, can be expressed as [1]

1XN
Xk ¼ x e  j2πki=N ð9Þ
Ni¼1 i

Then the Hankel matrix for the spectrum vector can also be constructed similarly to Eq. (6) as
2 3
X1 X2 … Xn
6 7
6 X2 X3 ⋯ Xn þ 1 7
6 7
½A ¼ 6 ð10Þ
6 ⋮ ⋮ ⋱ ⋮ 7 7
4 5
Xm Xm þ 1 ⋯ XN

where the same relationship as before holds here, i.e. m þ n 1 ¼ N. The reconstructed spectrum vector in Eq. (11) is the de-
noised spectrum vector, containing less background noise compared to the original spectrum vector, Xk , in Eq. (9). Again, the
reconstruction process for spectrum vector can be done via Eq. (8) by replacing Xi with xi as
β
X
1
Xi ¼ Ai  j þ 1; j ð11Þ
βαþ1 j ¼ α
It is worth noting that the Cadzow filtering proposed in [34] follows the same procedure as presented in this section but
the output spectrum vector is then converted back to the time domain via Inverse Fourier Transform.

3. De-noising and ball bearing fault detection: experimental case studies

3.1. Description of the test rig

A picture of the test machine and its accessories are presented in Fig. 3a. The test setup named Machinery Diagnosis
System, PT500, is made by GUNT Co., having a rotating shaft, two accelerometers, an electric motor, two loading disks, two
supporting ball bearings, V-belt/pulley mechanism, USB box, data acquisition system, an amplifier, and an analyzer. In the
measurements, ICPs type accelerometer, namely IMI603C01, positioned over the housing of the faulty bearing is used to

1) Computer

2) Electric motor

3) Healthy bearing
housing
9
4) Faulty bearing
housing

1 10 8 5) Rotating shaft

6) Loading disks

7) Vibration sensor
5 7
2 8) V-belt/pulley
mechanism
3 4
6 9) Data acquisition
system & amplifier

10) Tachometer

Small fault Medium fault Large fault

Fig. 3. (a) Ball bearing fault detection test rig; (b) artificially created bearing faults.
 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50 41

Table 1
Defective ball bearings fault size details.

Fault name Fault size

Large 7 [mm]  6 [mm]

Medium 4 [mm]  4 [mm]
Small 2 [mm]  2 [mm]

Table 2
Geometry details of ORS6204 ball bearing.

Outer Race Diameter Inner race diameter Number of balls Contact angle Bearing width Balls diameter

47 [mm] 20 [mm] 8 01 14 [mm] 7 [mm]

collect the vibration data. Loading disks (each has a weight of 1675 g) and V-belt/pulley mechanism are used in the system
in order to apply radial load. The details of all the loads acting on the tested ball bearings are given in Appendix A. Two
methods of measuring belt tension are utilized. The first method is based on measuring the belt tension by deflection and a
pretension measuring device, namely OTIKRIK 0, is used for this purpose. The second method of measuring the V-belt
pretension is based on measuring the fundamental natural frequency of the segment of the tensioned belt between two
pulleys using acoustic signal captured via a microphone. Acoustic signal is generated by exciting the pretensioned belt. The
second method is preferred at higher pretension levels. Shaft rotational speed was 1200 RPM (20 Hz) and the sampling
frequency was set to 32 kHz. Experiments were performed using three single-row self-aligning ball bearings type ORS6204,
having an artificially added local fault with various size on individual outer races, which are shown in Fig. 3b. Each ball
bearing was used to study only one type of fault. There were three ball bearings having large, medium, and small defect
sizes, respectively.
A drill was used to produce an artificial fault (pit) on the outer race. Starting from the undamaged condition, a transversal
line on the contact area between outer race and balls was created and extended step by step to cover a square or nearly
square zone, which can be considered as a typical local fault on a ball bearing at its final stage. Table 1 lists the
corresponding fault size on each ball bearing tested and Table 2 lists the geometric details of ORS6204 type ball bearings
used in the tests.
It is well known that, the fundamental fault frequency for an outer race defective ball bearing can be estimated from ball
bearing geometry. The fundamental fault frequency for outer race where outer race is stationary and inner race rotates in
shaft can be formulated as
 
NB D cos β
BPFO ¼ F s 1  b ð12Þ
2 Dp
where NB , F s , Db , Dp , and β are number of balls, shaft rotating frequency, ball diameter, pitch diameter, and ball bearing
contact angle, respectively. The related fault frequency (BPFO) at 1200 RPM for the ball bearing type ORS6204 is obtained to
be approximately as 63 Hz.

3.2. Experimental results

The performances of the de-noising method described in previous section are investigated using measured data in this
section. First, the pretension in V-belt is set to 130 N which yields approximately 300 N radial load on the faulty bearing. The
vibration transducer is positioned to measure the vertical accelerations of the bearing housing. The position of the defective
area on the outer race of a ball bearing was about 601 from the vertical axis along which the transducer is positioned. Figs. 4
and 5 show, respectively, the raw vibration signals measured from the housing of outer race defective ball bearings for a
time period of 0.5 s and their amplitude spectrums, respectively. As expected, in accordance with the findings in the
literature, the amplitude spectrums of the vibration signals are not capable of displaying the fault frequencies. In such cases,
envelope analysis is the most common method for the fault frequency detection.
In what follows, the performance of the proposed approach for ball bearing fault detection is assessed in detail in both
time and frequency domains at a constant 300 N radial bearing load first. Then, the effects of varying the bearing load are
investigated by changing the pretention in the V-belt.

3.2.1. De-noising for ball bearing fault detection in time domain

The noise elimination method in time domain is applied to the raw vibration signals presented in Fig. 4. Three Hankel
matrices, each of which has 1000 rows, are formed for individual matrices corresponding to the test cases with ball bearings
having small, medium and large local faults. The number of singular values to be used for noise elimination is determined
systematically. For this purpose, the kurtosis ratio of the output de-noised signals to input raw signal is obtained as function
42 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50

20

-20
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5

20
Amplitude [m/s ]
2

-20
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5

20

-20
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5

Time [s]

Fig. 4. Vibration signals corresponding to outer race defective ball bearings with (a) small fault (b) medium fault (c) large fault.

1
1

0.5
0.5
Zoomed spectrum
0
0 100 200 300 400 500
0
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000 16000

1
1
Magnitude

0.5
0.5
Zoomed spectrum
0
0 100 200 300 400 500
0
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000 16000

1
1

0.5
0.5
Zoomed spectrum
0
0 100 200 300 400 500
0
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 10000 12000 14000 16000
Frequency [Hz]

Fig. 5. Amplitude spectrum of the vibration signals in Fig. 4; (a) small fault (b) medium fault (c) large fault.

of the first l number of singular values for the reconstruction, up to 500 first singular values. Fig. 6 presents the
corresponding results for all the case studies described earlier. According to the results in Fig. 6, the first 30 singular values
for the ball bearing with small fault and the first 40 singular values for ball bearings with medium and large faults are
considered to be sufficient for the elimination of the background noise and to maximize the kurtosis ratio. It is worth
mentioning here that as the number of singular values included in reconstruction process approaches to the maximum
possible quantity (i.e. the number of all singular values), the ratio of the kurtosis, as expected, approaches to 1.
The de-noised vibration signals are plotted in Fig. 7. In order to have a better understanding of de-noising effects in time
domain, the envelope analysis is performed for the original signal and its de-noised version captured from small fault case
study up to 500 Hz and the results are presented in Fig. 8. It is seen that, in spite of the fact that the overall amplitudes of
envelope spectrum of the de-noised signal are somewhat reduced, the envelope spectrum of the de-noised signal has lower
 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50 43

1.5
Small fault
Medium fault
1.3 Large fault

Kurtosis ratio
1.1

0.9

0.7

0.5
50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
Number of non zero singular values in reconstruction process

Fig. 6. Illustration of the kurtosis ratio of the output to input signals in SVD-based de-noising algorithm.

20

-20
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5

20
Amplitude [m/s 2]

-20
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5

20

-20
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5
Time [s]

Fig. 7. SVD-based de-noised vibration signals correspond to the vibration signals in Fig. 4; (a) small fault (b) medium fault (c) large fault.

0.6
1×BPFO
0.5

0.4
Magnitude

2×BPFO
0.3
3×BPFO

0.2

0.1

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
Frequency [Hz]

Fig. 8. Envelope spectrum of the ball bearing with small fault for original and de-noised vibration signals.

noise level than that of the original signal, hence yielding a slightly better detection of the related fault frequency (BPFO). It
is also worth noting that while the original and de-noised signals in their envelope spectrums share more or less the same
maxima at the first and second harmonics of BPFO, the third harmonic is visible only in the envelope spectrum of the
de-noised signal.
44 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50

b
1 1

0.8 0.8
Magnitude

Magnitude
BPFO BPFO
0.6 0.6

0.4 0.4

0.2 0.2

0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
Frequency [Hz] Frequency [Hz]

1 1

0.8 0.8
Magnitude

Magnitude
0.6 0.6
BPFO BPFO
0.4 0.4

0.2 0.2

0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
Frequency [Hz] Frequency [Hz]
Fig. 9. Envelope spectrums of de-noised vibration signals for small fault case study based on (a) SVD (b) ARMED filtering (c) DTCWT (d) Wiener filtering.

100

10-1
Normalized singular values

10-2

10-3

10-4

10-5
Small fault
10-6 Medium fault
Large fault
-7
10
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Number of singular values

Fig. 10. Normalized singular values of the spectrums in Fig. 5.

In addition, the effectiveness of the proposed signal noise elimination method is compared with that of some other most
commonly used de-noising techniques. For this purpose, ARMED filtering (the combination of the AR filtering and MED
filtering) [12,13], Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT) with the universal threshold and soft thresholding
technique [35], and the well-known Wiener filtering [36] are also applied to the original vibration signals and the results for
the small fault case study in terms of envelope spectrums are shown in Fig. 9. It can be said that the performance of the SVD-
based method is either better or comparable with others.

3.2.2. De-noising for ball bearing fault detection in frequency domain

In this section, SVD of Hankel matrix based de-noising process is applied to the amplitude spectrums of ball bearing
vibration signals. For this purpose, again, three Hankel matrices each with 1000 rows are formed using the spectrum vectors
obtained via FFT. Fig. 10 presents the normalized singular values obtained for the tested ball bearings in logarithmic scale.
For de-noising purpose, a threshold value needs to be chosen in Fig. 10. Inspection of Fig. 10 reveals that the singular values
start to drop sharply up to about 100th singular value and then remain quite steady over a wide range. Therefore, in all cases
 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50 45

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

0.8
Magnitude

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Frequency [Hz]

Fig. 11. Zoomed amplitude spectrums of the original vibration signals in Fig. 4; (a) small fault (b) medium fault (c) large fault.

0.8

0.6
1×BPFO 2×BPFO 3×BPFO 4×BPFO
0.4

0.2

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

0.8
Magnitude

0.6 3×BPFO
2×BPFO 4×BPFO
1×BPFO
0.4

0.2

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

0.8
1×BPFO 2×BPFO 3×BPFO 4×BPFO
0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Frequency [Hz]

Fig. 12. SVD-based de-noised amplitude spectrums (using 100 singular values) of the vibration signals in Fig. 4; (a) small fault (b) medium fault (c)
large fault.

the first about 100 singular values are used for the noise elimination and reconstruction process. Figs 11 and 12 illustrate the
original and the de-noised amplitude spectrums up to 350 Hz, respectively. As it can be seen, the original amplitude
spectrums in Fig. 11, especially for the small fault case are unable to indicate the expected fault frequency clearly. However,
inspection of the de-noised spectrum in Fig. 12 reveals that noise removal from vibration spectrum makes the fault
frequency and its harmonics very visible.
For better comparisons, spectrums presented in Figs. 11c and 12c are overlaid in Fig. 13. It is clearly seen that the de-
noising the amplitude spectrum using the SVD-based method makes the fault frequency much sharper and very visible
indeed.
It is obvious that selecting the threshold, hence the number of most significant singular values to include during the
reconstruction process is important. Therefore, it is essential to assess the sensitivity of this threshold for fault detection
46 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50

1
Original spectrum
0.9
De-noised spectrum
0.8

0.7 4×BPFO
3×BPFO

Magnitude
0.6 1×BPFO
2×BPFO
0.5

0.4
0.3

0.2

0.1

0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Frequency [Hz]

Fig. 13. Original and de-noised spectrums of the vibration signal captured from ball bearing with large fault.

1 1
Original spectrum Original spectrum
De-noised spectrum De-noised spectrum
Magnitude

Magnitude

0.5 0.5

0 0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Frequency [Hz] Frequency [Hz]

1 1
Original spectrum Original spectrum
De-noised spectrum De-noised spectrum
Magnitude

Magnitude

0.5 0.5

0 0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350
Frequency [Hz] Frequency [Hz]
Fig. 14. Original and de-noised amplitude spectrums for large fault case study using (a) 50 (b) 150 (c) 250 (d) 350 singular values.

purposes. The spectrums presented in Fig. 14 are obtained by including different numbers of most significant singular values
for noise eliminations. Comparing the results in Fig. 14 with those in Fig. 13 reveals that including the first most significant
50 or 100 or 150 singular values do not make much difference, all of them yielding much better detection of the fault
frequency relative to the original spectrum. However, as expected, including higher number of singular values (e.g. 350)
during the reconstruction process gradually reduces the benefit of noise removal. It can be said that the fault detection via
de-noising is not very sensitive to the exact threshold value nor to the exact number of singular values included for de-
noising purpose, provided that a sensible number of the most significant singular values are included during this process.

3.2.3. The effects of bearing load

The features of the captured data from rotating machineries can be highly dependent on the level of load acting on the
system and consequently it is necessary to investigate the effect of loading. For this purpose, four vibration signals for small
fault case were measured; the first signal was acquired without using V-belt/pulley mechanism, the other three signals were
acquired using V-belt/pulley mechanism with 200 N, 350 N and 500 N belt pretensions (Fb), respectively. The resulting radial
 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50 47

20 20
Original signal Original signal
De-noised signal De-noised signal
10 10
Amplitude [m/s ]

Amplitude [m/s ]
2

2
0 0

-10 -10

-20 -20
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5
Time [s] Time [s]

20 20
Original signal Original signal
De-noised signal De-noised signal
10 10
Amplitude [m/s ]

Amplitude [m/s ]
2

2
0 0

-10 -10

-20 -20
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5
Time [s] Time [s]
Fig. 15. Original and de-noised vibration signals for small fault case study under approximately (a) 25 N (b) 460 N (c) 800 N (d) 1150 N radial loads.

0.4 0.4
Original spectrum Original spectrum
De-noised spectrum De-noised spectrum
0.3 0.3
Magnitude

Magnitude

0.2 0.2 1×BPFO

2×BPFO

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
Frequency [Hz] Frequency [Hz]

0.4 0.4
Original spectrum Original spectrum
De-noised spectrum De-noised spectrum
0.3 0.3
Magnitude

Magnitude

1×BPFO 1×BPFO
0.2 2×BPFO 0.2 2×BPFO

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 0 100 200 300 400 500
Frequency [Hz] Frequency [Hz]
Fig. 16. Original and de-noised spectrums for small fault case study under approximately (a) 25 N (b) 460 N (c) 800 N (d) 1150 N radial loads.
48 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50

loads on the faulty bearing, according to Appendix A, are approximately 25 N (due to loading discs), 460 N, 800 N and
1150 N, respectively. It is worth stating that the maximum radial load of 1150 N here is approximately equal to typical
operational load of the tested ball bearing type 6204.
For the purpose of fault detection, the performance of the noise elimination approaches for both time and frequency
domains are investigated using the measured vibrations signals under various radial loads described above. Fig. 15 illustrates
the original vibration signals as well as their SVD-based de-noised versions using the optimum number of most significant
singular values in the reconstruction process. It is seen, not surprisingly, that the vibration levels do not increase as the
bearing load is increased, actually, vibration levels tend to decrease. Fig. 16, on the other hand, illustrates both the original
and the de-noised amplitude spectrums of the measured vibration signals. The results in Fig. 16a show that, at very low level
of radial load (a few percent of operational load) it is not possible to detect the fault. However, it is clearly seen in other plots
that, the SVD-based de-noising approach makes it possible to detect the fault when there is a significant level of radial load
applied to the system. It is also seen in Fig. 16d that, bearing fault is successfully detected under typical operational load of
the tested bearing.

4. Conclusions

In this study, an SVD-based de-noising approach is successfully applied for ball bearing localized fault detection in both
time and frequency domains for the real and the simulated vibration signals. The Hankel matrix is used for forming the
trajectory matrix in order to perform de-noising operation in the field of Condition Monitoring and ball bearing fault
detection is demonstrated. It is found that de-noising in frequency domain appears to yield more successful fault
identification than the de-noising in time domain.
It is also shown in this study that de-noising the amplitude spectrum using the SVD-based method makes the fault
frequency much sharper and very visible. This suggests that the fault identification using the de-noised amplitude spectrum
can be a viable alternative to envelope analysis. It should be noted, however, that the effectiveness of the de-noising method
depends on appropriate selection of the threshold level. Therefore, the number of most significant singular values which
needs to be included for the reconstruction process is an important parameter hence, a systematic identification of this
threshold is recommended.
Finally, it is worth stating that the ball bearing fault detection approach presented here needs to be assessed using real
faults in industrial environments. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed approach needs to be investigated under
non-stationary operating conditions.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank to the ball bearing manufacturer “ORS: Ortadogu Rulman Sanayi ve Tic. A.S.” in general
and Dr. Hamdullah Merdane in particular for providing ball bearings with artificial faults used in this work. The authors also
thank to Research Assistants Mehmet Sait Ozer and Furkan Terzioglu in Mechanical Engineering Department of Istanbul
Technical University for their assistance during the tests.

Appendix A

The top view of the rotor-bearing-pulley system used in the experiment is schematically illustrated in Fig. A.1.
All the loads acting on the supported ball bearings of the main rotating shaft are also shown in Fig. A.2.
The V-belt/pulley mechanism in the test rig is used solely for creating radial load on the faulty bearing. The belt tension
forces shown in Fig. A.2, Fb1 and Fb2, are expected to be slightly different from each other in order to create the torque
needed for overcoming the frictional losses. However, the frictional losses at the healthy bearing side of the V-belt/pulley
Mechanism
Pulley-Belt

Healthy Bearing

Coupling
M

Healthy Bearing Loading Disks Faulty Bearing

Electric Motor

Fig. A.1. Top view of the rotor-bearing-pulley system used in PT500.

 R. Golafshan, K. Yuce Sanliturk / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 70-71 (2016) 36–50 49

R1: reaction
Front view Right view force on ball
θ1 bearing #1.
Fb1

Pulley
Fz R2: reaction
Fb2
force on ball
θ2 bearing #2.
ws Fy
Fy w1, w2:
R1y w1 w2 R2y
weight loads.

Faulty bearing
a
b R2z ws: shaft
c
d
weight.
e
R 2y Fb: V-belt
pretension.
Fig. A.2. Scheme of acting loads on the diagnosis system.

Table A.1
Gravitational loads and geometric dimensions.

w1 ¼ 16:43 ½N w2 ¼ 16:43 ½N ws ¼ 12:75 ½N

a¼ 40 [cm] b¼ 35 [cm] c ¼29.5 [cm] d ¼18 [cm] e¼ 10 [cm]

mechanism is expected to be very small hence for the estimation of the radial load it is assumed that Fb1 ¼Fb2 ¼Fb. Also, the
angles, θ1 and θ2, are small hence the total force acting on pulley on the rotating shaft can be obtained as
F y ¼ F b sin θ1  F b sin θ2 ¼ 0

F z ¼ F b cos θ1 þ F b cos θ2 ¼ 2F b
Accordingly, the reaction force, R2, on the faulty bearing (ball bearing #2) can also be determined using equilibrium
equation as:
X
M 1x ¼ 0-R2y ðbÞ  w1 ðeÞ  w2 ðcÞ ws ðdÞ ¼ 0

w1 ðeÞ þw2 ðcÞ þ ws ðdÞ

R2y ¼ ¼ 25 ½N
b
where a, b, c, d and e are geometric dimensions. Similarly,
X
M 1y ¼ 0-R2z ðbÞ ¼ F z ðaÞ

F z ðaÞ
R2z ¼ ffi2:3F b
b
As a result, the radial load acting on the faulty bearing is:
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
With V-belt/pulley mechanism:R2 ¼ R22y þR22z
Without V-belt/pulley mechanism:R2 ¼ R2y

Since R2y is much smaller than R2z , the total radial load can be assumed as R2y ¼ 2:3F b .
Gravitational loads acting on the system and the geometric dimensions are listed in Table A.1.

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