Successive variational mode decomposition and blind source separation based on salp swarm optimization for bearing fault diagnosis

Abstract

In this paper we are interested in developing a new approach that combines successive variational mode decomposition and blind source separation based on salp swarm optimization for bearing fault diagnosis. Firstly, vibration signals are pre-processed using successive variational mode decomposition to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Then, the dynamic time warping algorithm is adopted to select the most effective modes which will be considered as mixture signals. In the second step we apply salp swarm algorithm (SSA) for estimating the de-mixing matrix to extract independent components from mixture signals. However, SSA suffers from the problem of population diversity. Consequently, it offers somewhat different independent sources at every execution of the program. To overcome this shortcoming, the SSA based source estimation will be executed several times with different ranges of initial positions. Then, a fuzzy C-mean algorithm is introduced to select the reliable independent components. The suggested method is tested based on two experiments and compared with other blind source algorithms based on Bat and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested method in recovering reliable independent components and extracting fault frequency of bearings.