Abstract:The periodic impulse feature is the most typical fault signature of the vibration signal from fault rolling element bearings (REBs). However, it is easily contaminated by noise and interference harmonics. In order to extract the incipient impulse feature from the fault vibration signal, this paper presented an autocorrelation function periodic impulse harmonic to noise ratio (ACFHNR) index based on the SVD-Teager energy operator (TEO) method. Firstly, the Hankel matrix is constructed based on the raw vibration fault signal of rolling bearing, and the SVD method is used to obtain the singular components. Afterwards, the ACFHNR index is employed to measure the abundance of the periodic impulse fault feature for the singular components, and the component with the largest ACFHNR index value is extracted. Moreover, the properties of the ACFHNR index are demonstrated by simulations and the full life cycle of the experiment, showing its superiority over the traditional kurtosis and root mean square (RMS) index for extracting and detecting incipient periodic impulse features. Finally, the Teager energy operator spectrum of the extracted informative signal is gained. The simulation and experimental results indicated that the proposed ACFHNR index based method can effectively detect the incipient fault feature of the rolling bearing, and it shows better performance than the kurtosis and RMS index based methods.Keywords: rolling element bearings (REBs); singular value decomposition (SVD); autocorrelation function impulse harmonic to noise ratio (ACFHNR); teager energy operator (TEO)