Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing

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

Underdetermined blind separation of bearing faults in

hyperplane space with variational mode decomposition
Guozheng Li, Gang Tang ⇑, Ganggang Luo, Huaqing Wang
College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In the health monitoring of rotating machinery, there often coexists multiple fault sources.
Received 27 September 2017 Thus a multi-source compound fault signal will be excited and collected by sensors.
Received in revised form 14 July 2018 Moreover, due to the practical limitations, the number of sensors is usually less than that
Accepted 14 October 2018
of the source signals, which makes it an underdetermined blind source separation (BSS)
problem to identify the fault signals. Because the observed signals are usually not sparse
enough in low-dimension transform domains, it is not ideal to solve the underdetermined
Keywords:
BSS problem in the low-dimension space with traditional methods. In this study, we solve
Underdetermined blind source separation
Matrix estimation
the problem by exploring more effective features of the signal in the hyperplane space with
Variational mode decomposition variational mode decomposition. We construct the hyperplane from a variational mode
Normal vector of hyperplane decomposition of the compound fault signal, and develop a mixed matrix estimation model
based on that in the hyperplane space. Simulation and experiments show that the pro-
posed methodology can effectively separate the compound fault signals of rotating
machinery and detect the fault features.
Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

In modern engineering, as the rotating machinery tend to feature high-speed and large-scale, their productivity and oper-
ating safety are of absolute importance [1]. Therefore, accurate detection of fault features and effective fault diagnosis meth-
ods are pivotal for rotating machinery. And vibration analysis is one of the primary methods for mechanical condition
monitoring and fault diagnosis [2].
In the health monitoring of rotating machinery, there often coexists multiple fault sources that excite a compound vibra-
tion signal. Thus, a blind source separation (BSS) [3] of the signal should be performed to identify the fault features. However,
in practice, sensors for data collection are often required to be installed at specific locations with a limited number, and the
number of fault sources in most cases outnumbers that of the observed signals. Therefore, in order to identify the fault fea-
tures excited by different sources effectively, a separation of the observed compound signal should be resolved, which is
actually an underdetermined BSS problem.
Generally, there are two ways to solve the problem of underdetermined BSS. One is to transform the underdetermined
problem into a positive definite problem, through a decomposition of the original observed signal into multi-channel modal
signals, e.g. ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) [4–6] or variational mode decomposition (VMD) [7–9]. Next,
an input matrix for independent component analysis (ICA) [10,11] is constructed by these decompositions, so as to transform

⇑ Corresponding author at: College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, 15 North Third Ring Road, Beijing
100029, China.
E-mail address: tanggang@mail.buct.edu.cn (G. Tang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymssp.2018.10.016
0888-3270/Ó 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
84 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97

the problem into a determined one. Another way is to create the separation through an estimation of the mixed matrix
between the source and observed signal. With the development of modern sparse methods, it is stated that, if the observed
signal is sparse enough, the underdetermined BSS problem can be converted into a transform domain as a problem of mixed
matrix estimation, known as sparse component analysis (SCA) [12]. The starting point for ICA is the assumption that the
components are statistically independent. And it is assumed that the independent component must have non-Gaussian dis-
tributions [13]. However, a large number of signals in engineering practice do not always satisfy all of the assumptions, espe-
cially the statistically independence assumption [14–16]. Therefore, SCA is a more appropriate solution in these cases.
The compound signal in the frequency domain or other low-dimension space is often not sparse enough, because of com-
plex influence factors such as the nature of the equipment, the vibration caused by equipment malfunction, the interaction
among the accessories and the noise of the surrounding environment. Thus, SCA method is usually insufficient to estimate
the mixed matrix and source signal [17–19]. Considering that the data analysis probably performs well in the high-
dimension space [20–22], this study tries to solve the underdetermined BSS problem considered in the hyperplane space,
by constructing normal vectors of hyperplane (NVH) and estimating the underdetermined mixed matrix in the high-
dimension domain, which relaxes the requirements on the sparseness of temporal signal sequences. In addition, most of
the observed signals have very low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), resulting from not only the surrounding environment
but also the used modal decompositions. In such cases, a modal analysis method that is suitable for dealing with low
SNR signals should be adopted. The VMD method is used to derive the mode function in the frequency domain, and therefore
is applicable in the low SNR signal.
In this paper, the observed signal is decomposed through the VMD method to obtain band-limited intrinsic mode func-
tions (BLIMFs). After estimating the number of source signals based on the BLIMFs, the cluster input matrix of the same
dimension with the source number is constructed. Next, the mixed matrix estimation is carried out through the NVH method
in the hyperplane space. Last, the source signals are recovered from the observed signal by the shortest-path method. The
simulation and experiments verify the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method.
The remaining part of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 states the BSS problems. Section 3 introduces the
method to address the underdetermined BSS problem from the low-dimension to hyperplane space. In section 4, a brief
introduction about the VMD algorithm is presented. Section 5 describes the proposed methodology based on VMD in the
hyperplane space. Section 6 presents the methodology simulation, a description of the experimental test, the methodology
application and a comparison with traditional methods in the low-dimension space. Conclusions are given in Section 7.

2. Problem statement

BSS refers to the process of recovering source signals from observed signals with little prior information about the source
signals and the transmission channel. Consider the following linear model with instantaneous signals:
xðt Þ ¼ AsðtÞ ð1Þ

where, sðtÞ ¼ ½s1 ðtÞ; s2 ðt Þ;    ; sn ðtÞT denotes an n-dimension compound source signal; xðtÞ ¼ ½x1 ðtÞ; x2 ðt Þ;    ; xm ðt ÞT denotes
an m-dimension observed signal; A is a mixed matrix; and t represents the observation moment.
Generally, the observed signal is a multi-source compound fault signal, and the number of sensors is less than that of the
source signals because of the practical limitation on sensor positions, i.e. m < n, which is the underdetermined BSS problem.
Owing to the irreversibility of the mixed system in low-dimension domains, most traditional BSS methods do not work for
the underdetermined BSS. In addition, as a typical non-linear and non-stationary signal, the vibration signal of a bearing is
often submerged by the environmental noise in practical engineering applications [23]. Moreover, the collected signal often
interacts with vibrations excited by other components, which will also affect the BSS performance [24]. Therefore, the actual
signals are usually observed with very low SNR, especially in the complex fault diagnosis from a single-channel signal with
modal decomposition methods.
Estimating the mixed matrix A between the source and observed signal is an effective way to solve the underdetermined
BSS problem. It requires the compound signal to be sparse enough; however, the compound signal is not sparse enough in
many low-dimension transform domains (e.g. frequency domain). Thus, to solve the underdetermined BSS problem, one way
is to develop new sparse transforms in the low-dimension space, while another is to solve the problem in a high-dimension
space.

3. From low-dimension space to hyperplane space

It is cumbersome to solve the underdetermined BSS problem in low-dimension domains due to the lack of sparsity, the
vibration caused by equipment malfunction, the interaction among the accessories, and the noise of the outside environ-
ment. To address the underdetermined BSS problem, this study considers it in the hyperplane space. As shown in Fig. 1,
the circles and triangles are difficult to be classified thoroughly in a lower dimension space, whereas the separation problem
may be easier in a higher dimension space by using a hyperplane.
Given a set of m-dimension, linearly independent vectors fuk gm1
k¼1 , where uk ¼ diag ðu1 ; u2 ;    ; ukm Þ, the hyperplane H is
written as Eq. (2) [25].
 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97 85

Fig. 1. A diagram showing the data separation ways in different dimensions.


H ¼ yjy 2 Rm ; 8c1 ; c2 ;    ; cm1 2 R; y ¼ c1 u1 þ c2 u2 þ    þ cm1 um1 ð2Þ
In the three-dimensional space, the subspace spanned by any two linearly independent vectors is a plane passing through
the origin of the coordinate, and has only one normal vector without regard to the scale change. In the m-dimension space, if
subspace H spanned by any m  1 linearly independent vectors is a hyperplane passing through the origin of the coordinate,
it can be proven that there is only one normal vector, without considering the scale change and only one hyperplane passing
through the origin orthogonal to vector.
Select k vectors from Að A 2 Rmn Þ to form N A different hyperplanes, where N A ¼ C kn , whose set is denoted by UH . There are
N a hyperplanes with any vector aj from A in UH , where N a ¼ C k1 n1 . The intersection of N a hyperplanes is aj , and the set of its
normal vectors is Uv ; Uv ¼ fv 1 ; v 2 ;    ; v N g. According to the theorem, aj is the only normal vector of the hyperplane spanned
by any kðk  2Þ vectors in Uv .
Therefore, in the diagnosis of the bearing, we obtain the normal vector v corresponding to the element in UH directly from
the mixed signal data, incorporate v into UA , calculate the normal vector of the hyperplane spanned by vectors at the same
plane in UA , interpolate all the normal vectors, and obtain linear clustering lines. The direction of the straight lines is the
mixing matrix A. The method is used to estimate the mixed matrix through the normal vector of the hyperplane, which
avoids the hyperplane clustering with large computational complexity. In essence, this method is also a clustering mixed
matrix estimation method.
According to the theory above, the normal vector set UA should be calculated first as the following:
 T 2 !
X
N
xi v
f r ðv Þ ¼ exp  ð3Þ
i¼1
r

where, xi denotes the observed vector at time i, and r is a small constant. When xTi v is smaller relative to r, (that is, when v is
  2 
perpendicular to xi ), exp  xTi v =r is close to the maximum value of 1. Conversely, it is smaller than 1.
The gradient method is adopted to conduct the iterative solution to obtain the maximum value of f r , and a normal vector
v . The iterative solution is as follows:
 T 2 !
@f r 2 XN
 T  x v
¼ x x v exp  i ð4Þ
@v r i¼1 i i r
Normalize @f r =@ v :

@f r
!
@f r @v
¼ @f ð5Þ
@v k @ vr k

Use the following equation to update v :

@f r v
v ¼v þl ;v ¼ ; ð6Þ
@v kv k

where l is the step size factor and usually a multiple of r is taken. We obtain the maximum value of every f r to get the total
normal vectors v , which is the normal vector of hyperplane H spanned by fxi g. The estimation of the mixed matrix A b can be
calculated since the normal vector set UA is obtained. Steps to estimate the mixed matrix are shown in Fig. 2.
Parameters selection (r; TH1 ; TH2 ; TH3 and v ) in Fig. 2:
86 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97

Pre-set threshold Preprocessing of X normal vector v

Pre-set the threshold σ, Get Y after removing Initialize v, and update

TH1, TH2 and TH3 mean and decorrelation v until the maximum
value of fσ is obtained;

Yes Decision box

<yi ,v> ≤TH1 Update

Remove {yi}
Set {yi} from Y
Decision box
Record yi into {yi}.
The number elements Nve TH2 No
of {yi} is Nve.
Yes

Normal vector set ΦA

Then v is included in
the set ΦA

Matrix estamition
Select m vectors from ΦA
and calculate the absolute
value of the determinant. If
the value is smaller than
TH3, the column of mixed
matrix is stored in the
matrix

Fig. 2. The flowchart of mixed matrix estimation in hyperplane.

1. If r is too large, maximum of f r cannot be found. If it is too small, there will be many local maximums. In this study, a set
of gradually decreasing values r ¼ ½r1 ; r2 ;    ; r5  are used, where r1 is the standard deviation of noise rn .
2. 2. TH1 is used to determine whether v is perpendicular to the observed data and its value is generally proportional to the
standard deviation of noise. If TH1 is too large, there will be waste of some observed data; if it is too small, there will be
data re-use. Both cases affect the precision of mixed vector estimation. In this study, TH1 ¼ 2rn is adopted.
3. TH2 is used to constrain the total number of normal vectors to be obtained. In this study, TH2 ¼ N=2N A is adopted.
4. TH3 is used to determine whether a group of vectors are coplanar and its value relates to the noise intensity. Noiseless
signals are used in simulation (in Section 6.1), so TH3 ¼ 0:0001 is adopted. TH3 ¼ 2rn is adopted for rolling bearing diag-
nostic test (in Section 6.2).
5. Initialize the normal vector v . In this study, k v k ¼ 1 is adopted.

4. Principle of variational mode decomposition

Since the collected signal will be subject to significant interference when performing BSS processing, and most of the col-
lected signals have very low SNRs when single-channel, signal-complex fault diagnosis is performed using the modal decom-
position method in the actual environment. In order to solve the problem of underdetermined BSS and improve the SNR, the
VMD method is adopted. VMD is a new method of signal decomposition, through which multi-component signals are
decomposed into BLIMFs, so as to minimize the sum of the bandwidth estimation of each mode. Here, each mode is a finite
bandwidth with different center frequencies. We update each mode and its center frequencies continuously, through the
alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM) [26], so as to demodulate the modes to the corresponding baseband.
Finally, each mode and the corresponding center frequency will both be extracted. With a solid theoretical basis, the essence
of VMD is a number of adaptive Wiener filter groups, which show better noise robustness.
 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97 87

The constrained variational problem is as follows [9]:

( 2 )
X


 
 X
min @ t dðtÞ þ j  uk ðt Þ ejxk t  s:t: uk ¼ x ð7Þ
fuk g;fxk g  pt 
k 2 k

where fuk g ¼ fu1 ;          ; uk g and fxk g ¼ fx1 ;          ; xk g are a series of modes and their center frequencies,
respectively.
We introduce the quadratic penalty factor a and the Lagrangian factor k to turn the constraint variational problem into a
non-binding one. The extended Lagrangian expression is as follows [9]:

X
  2 
 X
2 *
 X
+
 j   
Lðfuk g; fxk g; kÞ ¼ a  jwk t 
@ t dðtÞ þ pt  uk ðt Þ e  þ

xðt Þ  uk ðt Þ þ kðt Þ; xðtÞ 

uk ðtÞ ð8Þ
k 2 k k 2

ADMM is used to iteratively update fuk g; fxk g; and k. Once the modal component is obtained, we apply the fast Fourier
transform (FFT) to the decomposed modes to obtain the frequency domain of the signal.

5. The proposed methodology

To solve the underdetermined BSS problem of compound bearing faults identification, we proposed a mixed matrix esti-
mation model based on VMD in the hyperplane space. The key steps of the proposed method are to decompose the original
compound fault signal using the VMD method, estimate the number of clusters according to information theory, construct
hyperplanes to estimate mixed matrix through the normal vector of the hyperplane, and recover the source signals from the
mixed matrix and modal signal. The detailed steps are described as follows.

5.1. Estimation of the sources number based on VMD and BIC criterion

The number of data clusters, (i.e., the number of source signals), should first be obtained for the mixed matrix estimation
with modal function in the hyperplane space. Here, we use the information theory criterion to estimate the number of
clusters.
The information theory criterion method mainly includes Akaike information criteria (AIC) [27], minimum description
length (MDL) [28] criterion, and Bayesian information criterion (BIC) [29]. Usually, AIC and MDL assume that the sample sig-
nal obeys the Gaussian distribution. In contrast, BIC can analyze non-Gaussian signals. The Minka Bayesian selection model
(MIBS) [30] based on BIC is a more effective model for real dimension estimation, whose purpose is to find a number
k ¼ nð1  k  lÞ that can maximize the cost function. The cost function of the MIBS model is as follows [30]:
!N=2
X
k
MIBSðkÞ ¼ pðxjkÞ pk ki re N
k
ðlkÞ
j Ak j
1=2
ð2pÞðdk þkÞ=2 N k=2 ð9Þ
j¼1

where N is the data length used to calculate the covariance matrix and the serial number n is the number of the source sig-
nals. MIBS can be approximated by BIC [31]:
!N=2
Y
k
BIC ðkÞ ¼ ki re kNðlkÞ=2 Nðdk þkÞ=2 ð10Þ
j¼1

The steps to estimate the clustering number are as follows:

Step 1: VMD decomposition. The signal is decomposed to obtain the BLIMF components, BLIMF ¼ ½c1 ; c2    cn1 ; rn T ,
where ci ; i ¼ 1; 2;    ; n is the BLIMF component and rn is the residual amount. Let r n ¼ cnþ1 , that is, the residual r n is
assumed to be the ðn þ 1Þth BLIMF component of the signal xðt Þ.
Step 2: Virtual signal reorganization. The signal xðtÞ and its BLIMF components are combined into a virtual multi-channel
sensor to observe the signal xBLIMF ðt Þ ¼ ½x; c1 ; c2    cn1 ; rn T .

Step 3: Covariance matrix calculation. The covariance matrix of xIMF is calculated by RBLIMF ¼ E xBLIMF ðtÞxBLIMF T ðtÞ .
Step 4: Singular value decomposition. The singular values of the covariance matrix RIMF are decomposed by
RIMF ¼ V s Ks V Ts þ V n Kn V Tn , and their singular values KIMF ¼ fk1 ; k2 ;    ; kM g are obtained.
Step 5: BIC criteria estimation. Calculate the value of each BICðkÞðk ¼ 1;    ; MÞ and determine the maximum value of
BICðkÞ. The corresponding k will be n, the number of original signals.

5.2. Hyperplane construction and estimation of mixed matrix based on VMD in the hyperplane space

The VMD method is a modal analysis method that can handle low SNR signals and exhibits good characteristics in signal
feature extraction. Therefore, the VMD method for signal decomposition is a good way to solve the problem of underdeter-
88 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97

mined BSS. In addition, due to the poor sparsity of the rotating machinery vibration signal, the traditional clustering analysis
method is ineffective.
Thus, this study adopts the VMD and NVH method to estimate the mixed matrix in the high dimension. First, the VMD
method is used to decompose the signal, to convert a single-channel signal into a multi-channel signal containing the source
signals. The number of original signals is then estimated on this basis. If the number of channels is equal to that of the orig-
inal signals, then the signals of all channels are clustered to obtain the hyperplane spanned by mixed vectors. If the number
of channels is more than that of original signals, then the channels with larger cross-correlation coefficients are chosen. The
mixed matrix is then estimated. The schematic diagram of hyperplane construction based on VMD is shown in Fig. 3.
In this study, the blind source separation algorithm is as follows:

Step 1: The original signal is decomposed by VMD to obtain its BLIMF components.
Step 2: The IMF matrix is decomposed by singular value, and the number of source signals is estimated through BIC
criterion.
Step 3: The right number of BLIMF matrices is clustered to obtain the hyperplane spanned by the mixed vectors, and the
mixed matrix is estimated.

5.3. Blind source signals recovery using the estimated mixed matrix

After the clustering is completed and the mixed matrix is estimated, the original signals can be recovered by the shortest
path method [18]. After the mixing matrix A is determined (since A is not a square matrix), the solution of si ðt Þ is not exclu-
1
sive in the case of known A and xðt Þ. A condition that the l norm of the solution should be the minimum needed, that is:

X
n
xðtÞ ¼ ai si ðt Þ ð11Þ
i¼1

P
where, ni¼1 jsi ðt Þj is the minimum value. The mixed signal xðtÞ is the sum of each vector ai si ðtÞ, ai is the vector direction (the
column vector of the mixed matrix), and si ðtÞ is its length. In all possible solutions, the shortest path from origin O to xðt Þ is
the solution demanded, and the smallest sum of the vector length is the solution in all combinations by decomposing the
observed signals.
For the two-sensor case, at each time t, there will always exist two column vectors aa and ab whose directions are closest
to the direction of xðt Þ. Let Ar ¼ ½aa ; ab 1 be the reduced m  m inverse matrix, and let sr ðtÞ be the reduced decomposition
along direction aa and ab . The sources are obtained as

s r ð t Þ ¼ A r xð t Þ
ð12Þ
su ðtÞ ¼ 0; u – a; b
In this paper, the selected BLIMFs are regarded as the observed signals, instead of the original signals collected by sensors,
for estimating A and source signals. According to Eq. (11), xðtÞ denotes the selected BLIMFs (observed signals), and si ðtÞ
denotes the source signals need to be estimated. Then the problem is to estimate the source signals in the case of known
A and xðtÞ. Based on the obtained mixed matrix, the shortest path method is used to find the optimal solution of the original
signals, thus the estimated source signals are obtained. Envelope spectrum analysis is conducted on the recovered source
signals to complete the complex fault diagnosis. The total flowchart is shown in Fig. 4.

BLIMF 1

Construct a
VMD BLIMF 2
hyperplane n
original
signal BLIMF 3
...
...
BLIMF k
b
!
Fig. 3. The schematic diagram of hyperplane construction based on VMD in hyperplane space. a ¼ BLIMF 1 ; BLIMF 2 ;    BLIMF k ,
!
b ¼ BLIMF 1 ; BLIMF 2 ;    BLIMF k .
 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97 89

Signal collection

Bearing test bench

2

-2
0 200 400 600 800 1000

VMD decomposition
1
0
BLIMF1
-1
0 200 400 600 800 1000
0.5
0
BLIMF2
-0.5
0 200 400 600 800 1000
0.2
Underdetermined
BSS
0
BLIMF3
-0.2
0 200 400 600 800 1000

Adjustment
parameters
Estimate the
number of source signals

Calculate the BIC(k) Overerdetermined

Determine the form of BSS BSS

Cross correlation
Determined BSS coefficients of
BLIMFs and the
original signal
Matrix estimation based on NVH

Constructing a
hyperplane and
estimating the
mixed matrix

Source signals recovery

0.5
0

Calculate the -0.510 50 100 150 200 S1

shortest path from 0 S2
origin to X(t) 10
-1
50 100 150 200

0 S3
-1
0 50 100 150 200

Fig. 4. The flowchart of the proposed methodology in hyperplane space with VMD.

6. Application cases

6.1. Simulation analysis

A simulated signal of the rotating machinery is used to verify the validity of the methodology. The simulated source signal
S ¼ ½s1 ; s2 ; s3 T is composed by Eq. (13).
90 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97

8
>
< s1 ¼ cosð2pf 1 t þ 10Þ
s2 ¼ 0:7cosð2pf 2 t Þ ð13Þ
>
:
s3 ¼ 0:4cos½ð2pf b tÞ þ bcosð2pf r t Þ
We note that, f 1 ¼ 100Hz, f 2 ¼ 220Hz,f b ¼ 150Hz, f r ¼ 20Hz, b ¼ 0:9, sampling frequency f ¼ 1KHz, and the number of
sampling point is 1024. The mixed matrix is selected as Eq. (14).


0:841 0:314 0:572
A¼ ð14Þ
0:417 0:691 0:832
The mixed signal is generated based on Eq. (15). The time-domain waveform and spectrum of the source and mixed sig-
nals are shown in Fig. 5.

X ¼ AS ¼ A½s1 ; s2 ; s3 T ð15Þ
As can be seen in Fig. 5(a)–(c), the characteristic frequencies f 1 ; f 2 ; f b of source signals s1 ; s2 ; s3 can be detected obviously.
However, they are absolutely submerged in mixed signals X1; X2, as shown in Fig. 5(d) and (e) (marked by the dashed
rectangle).

1 1
0 0.5
-1 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 (a) 0 100 200 300 400 500
1 1
0 0.5
-1 (b) 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 0 100 200 300 400 500
Amplitude/V

0.5
Amplitude/V

0.4
0 0.2
-0.5 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 (c) 0 100 200 300 400 500
2 1
0 0.5
-2 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 (d) 0 100 200 300 400 500
2 0.5
0
-2 (e) 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 0 100 200 300 400 500
sampling points f/Hz

Fig. 5. The waveform and spectrum of simulated signals: (a) source signal s1 ; (b) source signal s2 ; (c) source signal s3 ; (d) mixed signal X1; (e) mixed signal
X2. The characteristic frequencies f 1 ; f 2 ; f b of s1 ; s2 ; s3 are mixed in mixed signal X1; X2 as shown by the dashed rectangle.

0.5

-0.5

-1
1
0.5 1
0 0.5
0
-0.5 -0.5
-1 -1

Fig. 6. The scatter plot of the input signals. The data points are scattered on six circular planes respectively.
 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97 91

The signals are addressed based on the flowchart presented in this study. First, the simulated mixed signals are decom-
posed into three BLIMF components by VMD. These BLIMFs are then used for the input of the normal vector of the hyper-
plane method to estimate the mixed matrix. The scatter plot of the input signals is shown in Fig. 6. The estimated matrix is
calculated as shown in Eq. (16).

0.5 0.4

0 0.2 X: 150.4
Y: 0.3064
-0.5 (a) 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 0 100 200 300 400
1 1
Amplitude/V

Amplitude/V
0 0.5 X: 99.61
Y: 0.7563
-1 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 (b) 0 100 200 300 400
1 1 X: 219.7
Y: 0.526
0 0.5

-1 0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 (c) 0 100 200 300 400
sampling points f/Hz

Fig. 7. Waveform and spectrum of recovered source signals: (a) recovered signal s1 ; (b) recovered signal s2 ; (c) recovered signal s3 . Recovered source signals
s1 ,s2 ,s3 are basically the same as the simulated source signal s3 , s1 , s2 respectively.

Acceleration sensors

(a)

(b) (c) (d)

Fig. 8. The experimental set-up: (a) test bench; (b) outer-race and the fault; (c) inner-race and the fault; (d) rollers and the fault.
92 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97


e¼ 0:826 0:298 0:571
A ð16Þ
0:426 0:681 0:844
It is found that the original mixed matrix and the estimated mixed matrix are basically the same when comparing Eqs.
(14) and (16). The source signal is recovered by the shortest path method. The time domain waveform and spectrum of the
recovered source signals are shown in Fig. 7.
As can be seen from Fig. 7, the three recovered source signals and the actual simulated signals are exactly the same, which
verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.

6.2. Experiment and discussion

The methodology in this study is applied to the blind source separation and diagnosis of the actual rotating machinery.
Signals used in this section are at 1300 rpm, collected by the rolling bearing diagnostic test bench, including two sets of data:
the outer-race and rollers compound fault signal, and the inner-race and rollers compound fault.
The bearing test bench consists of a rotating machine, the roller bearing, and two acceleration sensors, as shown in Fig. 8
(a). The acceleration sensors are mounted on the bearing housing in the vertical and horizontal directions to measure the
vibration signals. The outer-race fault (0.5 mm (width)  0.15 mm (depth)), inner-race fault (0.5 mm (width)  0.15 mm
(depth)) and rollers fault (0.5 mm (width)  0.15 mm (depth)) are artificially created using a wire-cutting machine, as shown
in Fig. 8(b)–(d), respectively. Additionally, the commercial code of the test bearing is NTN N204 and the acceleration sensors
are mono-axial piezoelectricity type accelerometers (IMI 608A11).

Table 1
Fault characteristic frequencies.

Outer-race (f O ) Rollers (f R ) Inner-race (f I )

Frequency 86.3 Hz 102.3 Hz 145.8 Hz
Amplitude/V
Amplitude/V

5 5

0 0

-5 -5

0 0.5 1 0 0.5 1
t/s t/s
(a) (b)
0.1 0.2
X: 145.7
Amplitude/V

Amplitude/V

Y: 0.1281
X: 86.21
Y: 0.08044
0.05 0.1

0 0
0 50 100 150 200 0 50 100 150 200
f/Hz f/Hz
(c) (d)
0.4 0.1
Amplitude/V

Amplitude/V

X: 86.98 X: 145.7
0.2 Y: 0.3112 0.05 Y: 0.07387

0 0
0 50 100 150 200 0 50 100 150 200
f/Hz f/Hz
(e) (f)

Fig. 9. Waveform and envelope spectrum of observed signal at 1300 rpm: (a) waveform of outer-race and rollers compound fault; (b) waveform of inner-
race and rollers compound fault; (c) envelope spectrum of (a) without band-pass filtering; (d) envelope spectrum of (b) without band-pass filtering; (e)
envelope spectrum of (a) after band-pass filtering; (f) envelope spectrum of (b) after band-pass filtering. The fault characteristic frequencies f O ; f I are mixed
in the observed signals respectively, and the fault characteristic frequency f R is buried in both signals.
 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97 93

The sampling frequency is 100 k Hz and 1 s is intercepted as a time fragment. The fault characteristic frequencies of dif-
ferent subassemblies at 1300 rpm are presented in Table 1.
The time domain waveform and envelope spectrum with band-pass filtering [32] of the two sets of data are shown in
Fig. 9.
As can be seen in Fig. 9, both sets of signals have shown a strong impact in the time domain waveforms, indicating that
the bearing has failed. In the envelope spectrum, the outer-race fault and the inner-race fault can be well recognized, but the
rollers fault is submerged in noise and cannot be recognized. Therefore, traditional detection technology of envelope spec-
trum cannot separate the compound fault signals of rotating machinery effectively nor accurately extract the fault charac-
teristic frequency.
According to the flowchart in Fig. 4, the original observed signal is decomposed by VMD, and the multi-channel signals
are constructed through the BLIMF components to realize the determination of the underdetermined BSS. In this experiment,
the original signal is decomposed into six BLIMF components, which are used for the clustering input of the normal vector of
hyperplane method. The modal signals can be input for clustering, because the modal signals contain the basic attributes and
information of the original signal and its eigenvalue and characteristic frequencies are consistent with that of the original
observed signal. In addition, the BLIMF components are sparse in the time domain, which is favorable for the clustering esti-
mation of the normal vector of hyperplane. Fig. 10 shows the BLIMF components of the outer-race and the rollers compound
fault signal at 1300 rpm. Fig. 11 shows the BLIMF components of inner-race and rollers compound fault signal at 1300 rpm.
BIC is used to determine whether the default problem can be solved. First, we obtain the IMF matrix consisting of the
original observed signal xðtÞ and the BLIMF components obtained by xðt Þ after VMD decomposition. We then calculate the
covariance matrix of the IMF matrix and decompose it by the SVD method to obtain seven eigenvalues ki ði ¼ 1; 2;    ; 7Þ.
The results of the three groups are shown in Table 2. The eigenvalues are presented in descending order.
We calculate the values of BICðkÞðk ¼ 1;    ; MÞ based on Eq. (10) and determine the maximum value of BICðkÞ. The cor-
responding k is the number n of the original signals. The calculated BICðkÞ values are shown in Fig. 12.
As can be seen from Fig. 11, according to the BIC criterion, the number of compound fault signals is 3 in both observed
signals, consistent with the equipment design. Next, the cross-correlation coefficients are calculated for the six BLIMF com-
ponents and the original observed signal. And the results are shown in Fig. 13.

10
Amplitude/V

-10
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
t/s

VM D
BLIMF1 BLIMF2
2 2

0 0

-2 -2
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
BLIMF3 BLIMF4
1 2
Amplitude/V

Amplitude/V

0 0

-1 -2
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
BLIMF5 BLIMF6
2 1

0 0

-2 -1
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
t/s t/s

Fig. 10. The BLIMFs of outer-race and rollers compound fault signal at 1300 rpm.
94 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97

Amplitude/V
5

-5
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
t/s

VM D
BLIMF1 BLIMF2
5 2

0 0

-5 -2
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
BLIMF3 BLIMF4
Amplitude/V

2 5

Amplitude/V
0 0

-2 -5
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
BLIMF5 BLIMF6
2 2

0 0

-2 -2
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
t/s t/s

Fig. 11. The BLIMFs of inner-race and rollers compound fault signal at 1300 rpm.

Table 2
Eigenvalue of the IMF matrix at different signal.

k1 k2 k3 k4 k5 k6 k7
Outer-race and rollers compound fault signal 1.1526 0.9797 0.6700 0.5597 0.0276 0.0015 0.0006
Inner-race and rollers compound fault signal 1.7415 1.1367 0.8641 0.6310 0.0462 0.0197 0.0011

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
BIC(1) BIC(2) BIC(3) BIC(4) BIC(5) BIC(6) BIC(7)
outer-race and rollers compound fault signal
inner-race and rollers compound fault signal

Fig. 12. BICðkÞ values of different signals.

According to the cross-correlation coefficients in Fig. 13, the BLIMF components with larger coefficients are chosen to be
the input matrix. That is, the input matrix of the normal vector of hyperplane consisting of the first three BLIMF components
are chosen, to estimate the mixed matrix. The mixed matrix of outer-race and rollers compound fault is shown as Eq. (17),
and the mixed matrix of inner-race and rollers compound fault is shown as Eq. (18).
 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97 95

0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
BLIMF1 BLIMF2 BLIMF3 BLIMF4 BLIMF5 BLIMF6
outer-race and rollers compound fault signal
inner-race and rollers compound fault signal

Fig. 13. Cross correlation coefficients between the original signal and BLIMFs.

2 3
0:7579 0:4064 0:5961
e1 ¼ 6
A 4 0:2549 0:7543 0:5399 5
7
ð17Þ
0:6005 0:5157 0:5018
2 3
0:4577 0:5854 0:1645
e2 ¼ 6
A 4 0:6596 0:6758 0:3113 5
7
ð18Þ
0:7532 0:3154 0:9360
According to the estimated mixed matrix, the shortest-path method is used to separate the source signals. The envelope
spectrums for the two sets of separated signals are shown in Fig. 14.
It can be determined that the collected compound fault signal contains three types of faults, as shown in Fig. 14 by com-
paring the fault characteristic frequencies in the envelope spectrum of the separated signals with the calculated fault char-
acteristic frequencies in Table 1. Fig. 14(a) contains the outer-race fault, rollers fault, and unbalanced fault of the rolling
bearing. Fig. 14(b) contains inner-race fault, rollers fault, and unbalanced fault of the rolling bearing. These are consistent
with the rolling bearing fault set in the test system, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the method used in this study
in the separation of the underdetermined blind source of the actual rotating equipment. At the same time, compared with
the traditional envelope spectrum method, the proposed method can not only solve the problem of underdetermined BSS,
but also estimate the number of source signals and effectively separate the source signals.

0.04 0.2
X: 86.98 X: 145
X: 174
Y: 0.03507 0.1 Y: 0.1615
0.02 Y: 0.03178

0 0
0 50 100 150 200 0 50 100 150 200
0.04 0.04
Amplitude/V

Amplitude/V

X: 21.36 X: 21.36
Y: 0.03776 Y: 0.03721
0.02 0.02

0 0
0 50 100 150 200 0 50 100 150 200
0.04 X: 101.5 0.04
X: 100.7
Y: 0.02407 Y: 0.02232
0.02 0.02

0 0
0 50 100 150 200 0 50 100 150 200
f/Hz f/Hz
(a) (b)

Fig. 14. The envelope spectrums of separated signals: (a) outer-race and rollers compound fault signal. The fault characteristic frequencies of outer-race,
unbalanced and rollers are shown respectively from top to bottom; (b) inner-race and rollers compound fault signal. The fault characteristic frequencies of
inner-race, unbalanced and rollers are shown respectively from top to bottom.
96 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97

Table 3
Angular differences of K-means, FCM and proposed method.

Method Angular difference

First column Second column Third column
K-means 1.755 2.486 1.417
FCM 1.915 4.206 0.842
Proposed method 0.908 0.804 0.429

6.3. Comparison with traditional methods in the low-dimension space

To confirm that the proposed method can explore more effective features of the signal in the hyperplane space, the tra-
ditional methods in the low-dimension space are used.
It is assured that the mixed matrix estimation is a key part of the solution for underdetermined BSS problem. Thus, K-
means method and Fuzzy c-means (FCM) method are also used to estimate the mixed matrix in Section 6.1. The mixed
matrices estimated by the K-means method and FCM method are shown in Eq. (19) and (20), respectively.


0:886 0:356 0:522
A¼ ð19Þ
0:406 0:701 0:801


0:864 0:396 0:598
A¼ ð20Þ
0:393 0:725 0:843
The deviations of the estimated matrices are measured by comparing the angles between the original matrix and the cor-
responding column of the estimated matrices obtained by different algorithms, respectively. The angle of the corresponding
column is expressed as:

180 aT b
a¼ cos1 ð21Þ
p k a kk b k
The smaller a means that the error between the column of the estimated matrix and that of the corresponding matrix is
smaller. The angular differences between the corresponding column of the original and estimated matrix are obtained by the
three methods shown in Table 3.
It is found that the angles of the proposed method are the minimum values (i.e., the bold values in Table 3) in each colum,
which means that the mixed matrix estimated by the proposed method is more similar to the original matrix than the matri-
ces estimated by the traditional methods in the low-dimension space.

7. Conclusion

The traditional methods for underdetermined BSS in low dimensions are difficult for the rotating mechanical vibration
signal, because of the observed signal interacting with the vibration of other components and lack of sparsity. This paper
proposes a method to separate compound signals in the hyperplane space with VMD decomposition, and uses it for extract-
ing single-channel fault characteristics of compound signals for rolling bearings.
The proposed method employs the VMD algorithm to construct a multi-channel vector matrix related to the fault sources,
and realize an accurate estimation of the source number, which can improve the clustering accuracy of the normal vector of
hyperplane. The cluster of the modal vectors in the hyperplane space through the NVH method has higher adaptability for
rotating mechanical vibration signals to estimate the mixed matrix even with poor sparsity, thanks to the relaxed constraint
of sparseness in high dimensional space. However, the proposed method requires more operating memory due to the com-
puting complexity of the VMD algorithm. And optimized parameters according to the prior knowledge are important to the
clustering results of the NVH method. Therefore, future work will focus on further optimization of the proposed method and
reducing the reliance on the priori information.

Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no.51405012, 51675035) and the
Open Fund of State Key Laboratory, Southwest Jiaotong University (TPL1603).

References

[1] L. Song, H. Wang, P. Chen, Step-by-step fuzzy diagnosis method for equipment based on symptom extraction and trivalent logic fuzzy diagnosis theory,
IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Syst. (2018).
[2] L. Cui, T. Yao, Y. Zhang, X. Gong, C. Kang, Application of pattern recognition in gear faults based on the matching pursuit of a characteristic waveform,
Measurement 104 (2017) 212–222.
 G. Li et al. / Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 120 (2019) 83–97 97

[3] P. Comon, C. Jutten, J. Herault, Blind separation of sources, part II: problems statement, Signal Process. 24 (1991) 11–20.
[4] Zhaohua Wu, Norden E Huang, Ensemble empirical mode decomposition: a noise-assisted data analysis method, Adv. Adap. Data Anal. 1 (2009) 1–41.
[5] H. Wang, R. Li, G. Tang, H. Yuan, Q. Zhao, X. Cao, A Compound fault diagnosis for rolling bearings method based on blind source separation and
ensemble empirical mode decomposition, PLoS ONE 9 (2014).
[6] G. Tang, Q. Yang, H. Wang, G. Luo, J. Ma, Sparse classification of rotating machinery faults based on compressive sensing strategy, Mechatronics 31
(2015) 60–67.
[7] K. Dragomiretskiy, D. Zosso, Two-dimensional compact variational mode decomposition, J. Math. Imaging Vision 58 (2017) 294–320.
[8] G. Tang, G. Luo, W. Zhang, C. Yang, H. Wang, Underdetermined blind source separation with variational mode decomposition for compound roller
bearing fault signals, Sensors 16 (2016) 897.
[9] K. Dragomiretskiy, D. Zosso, Variational mode decomposition, IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 62 (2014) 531–544.
[10] P. Comon, Independent component analysis, a new concept?, Signal Process 36 (1994) 287–314.
[11] A. Hyvärinen, E. Oja, A fast fixed-point algorithm for independent component analysis, Neural Comput. 9 (1997) 1483–1492.
[12] P. Georgiev, F. Theis, A. Cichocki, Sparse component analysis and blind source separation of underdetermined mixtures, IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. 16
(2005) 992–996.
[13] A. Hyvärinen, E. Oja, Independent component analysis: algorithms and applications, Neural Netw. 13 (2000) 411–430.
[14] Y. Gang, Y. Zhou, W. Zhang, Blind source separation of correlated vibration sources, J. Vibrat. Shock 15 (2016) 216–221.
[15] X.F. Zhou, S.X. Yang, C.B. Gan, Blind source separation of statistically correlated sources, J. Vibrat. Shock 31 (2012) 60–64.
[16] Y. Xiang, S.K. Ng, V.K. Nguyen, Blind separation of mutually correlated sources using precoders, IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. 21 (2010) 82–90.
[17] M. Zibulevsky, B.A. Pearlmutter, Blind source separation by sparse decomposition in a signal dictionary, Neural comput. 13 (2001) 863–882.
[18] P. Bofill, M. Zibulevsky, Blind separation of more sources than mixtures using sparsity of their Short-Time Fourier Transform, in: Proceedings of ICA,
2000, pp. 87-92.
[19] P.S. Bradley, O.L. Mangasarian, K-plane clustering, J. Global Optim. 16 (2000) 23–32.
[20] Z. He, A. Cichocki, K-subspace clustering and its application in sparse component analysis, Proc. ESANN (2006).
[21] Y. Wang, S. Kang, Y. Jiang, G. Yang, L. Song, V.I. Mikulovich, Classification of fault location and the degree of performance degradation of a rolling
bearing based on an improved hyper-sphere-structured multi-class support vector machine, Mech. Syst. Signal Process. 29 (2012) 404–414.
[22] P. Georgie, F. Theis, A. Cichocki, Sparse component analysis and blind source separation of underdetermined mixtures, IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. 16
(2005) 992–996.
[23] Y. Liu, B. He, F. Liu, S. Lu, Y. Zhao, Feature fusion using kernel joint approximate diagonalization of eigen-matrices for rolling bearing fault identification,
J. Sound Vib. 385 (2016) 389–401.
[24] L. Cui, X. Gong, J. Zhang, H. Wang, Double-dictionary matching pursuit or fault extent evaluation of rolling bearing based on the Lempel-Ziv
complexity, J. Sound Vib. 385 (2016) 372–388.
[25] M. Xiao, S. Xie, Y. Fu, Underdetermined blind source separation algorithm based on normal vector of hyperplane, Acta Autom. Sin. 34 (2008) 142–149.
[26] H. Liu, B. Song, H. Qin, Z. Qiu, An adaptive-ADMM algorithm with support and signal value detection for compressed sensing, IEEE Signal Process Lett.
20 (2013) 315–318.
[27] H. Akaike, A new look at the statistical model identification, Automatic Control IEEE Trans. 19 (1974) 716–723.
[28] J. Rissanen, Minimum-description-length principle, Mit Press. 1 (2007) 257–268.
[29] G. Schwarz, Estimating the dimension of a model, Ann. Stat. 6 (1978) 15–18.
[30] T. P. Minka, Automatic choice of dimensionality for PCA, in: International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2000, pp. 577-583.
[31] R.E. Kass, A.E. Raftery, Bayes factors, J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 90 (1995) 773–795.
[32] R.B. Randall, Vibration-Based Condition Monitoring: Industrial, Aerospace and Automotive Applications, John Wiley & Sons, 2011.