International Conference on Magnetics, Machines & Drives (AICERA-2014 iCMMD)
Detection of Rolling Element Bearing Defects by
Vibration Signature Analysis: A review
Naseel Ibnu Azeez
Mechanical Department
AmalJyothi College of Engg.
Kanjirappally, India
naseel@live.com
Abstract—Almost all machines have rotating parts, of which
a vital and critical part is the bearing. The life of rotating
machines are mainly depended on the working condition of the
bearings. Detecting the health of the bearing has an important
role in predective maintenance system. Bearing failures leads to
safety issues and it negatively affect the working environment, in
terms of machine down times, interruption of production, leading
to higher manufacturing costs. The vibration signals siganture
generated from a rolling element bearing delivers huge amounts
of information about its structural dynamics and working
conditions. The basic principle behind the vibration analysis is,
the fact that any defect in a bearing gives rise to some vibration.
This vibration consists of certain frequencies depending on the
nature and location of the defect. The important measurement
parameters of vibration are displacement, velocity and
acceleration. On the basis of vibration analysis it is possible to
detect and locate even very small bearing faults like false
brinelling, minute wear marks etc. The vibration signal from a
good bearing is compared with the vibration signal from a faulty
bearing, the vibration signature generated from a defective
bearing differs from the normal state vibration signature and it is
determined through the shape of time domain signal peaks, the
randomness of peak position and also through frequency domain
characteristics.
Keywords—Vibration signal analysis, bearing defect detection, time
domain method, frequency domain method
I. INTRODUCTION
Rolling element bearings are the most widely used basic part
in industry and it should have high precision in alignment and
working. The motion accuracy of mechanical as well as
electrical devices depend up on the accuracy and precision of
rolling element bearing. The surface damages inside a bearing
is originated from a bearing fault and it will generate vibration
as well as noise whenever the defected components comes in
contact during the rotation of bearing, this will lead to
reduction of machine efficiency and also there is a possibility
that the machine may fail before the desired designed life
time. This will promote the risk and the danger coefficient in
any industry. Therefore, technologies those are capable to
detect the surface defect inside a rolling element bearing parts
has more importance in condition monitoring and predictive
maintenance in industry. Now-a-days the important issue in
the rolling element bearing industry is to increase the surface
quality of rolling bearing parts and then to increase the
978-1-4799-5202-1/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE
Ashwin Chandy Alex
Mechanical Engineering
AmalJyothi college of Engg.
Kanjirappally, India
ashwinchandyalex@amaljyothi.ac.in
rotational accuracy of roller bearings. Hence bearing vibration
signal analysis of rolling element bearing has great importance
in condition monitoring technique.
An industrial study carried out by Albrecht [1] indicates that
about 40% of catastrophic failures in electric motors originate
from defects in bearing components. Hence bearings have the
most important role in machine condition monitoring
technology. Another industrial study shows that up to one
third of total maintenance cost in an industry was wasted as a
result of improper upkeep due to the un-effective predictive
maintenance. [2] To prevent these issues and catastrophic
failure consequences generated from bearing malfunctioning,
an industry can adopt condition monitoring methods, such as
artificial visual detection, bearing temperature monitoring,
eddy current detection, wear debris analysis, magnetic particle
testing, oil analysis, optical fault detection, vibration signature
analysis, acoustic emission plot analysis and so on. [3] Out of
these technologies vibration signal analysis is more
economical and viable as it can also identify and detect
existence of faults in a running bearing during it’s working
time itself.
II. SOURCE OF VIBRATION
When a rolling element rolls over a surface under high tension
there will be a huge amount of stress occupied at the contact
point, in the case of rolling element bearing this high level
stress is generated between the rolling elements and the races
(outer and inner) and it is one of the basic mechanisms that
initiate a localized point defect in rolling element bearings.
This stress technically known as hertzian stresses or contact
stresses.
The Hertz Contact stress analysis assumes frictionless contact
(no sliding friction). Basically elastic deformation occurs
when curved surfaces are pressed together, so that a surface
compressive stress is generated (perpendicular to the surface).
Due to the Poisson’s effect the material also tries to expand in
other directions, and thus creates stresses in the plane of the
surface. The maximum shear stress occurs under the surface,
and it reverses sign as a rotating load approaches and then
passes. This alternating stress induces fatigue failure. Hertz
contact pressure alone is not entirely adequate for situations
 International Conference on Magnetics, Machines & Drives (AICERA-2014 iCMMD)
where sliding friction also occurs. The friction introduces a
tangential normal force and a tangential shear force. The
normal force reverses sign, and the surface tensile stress is the
more damaging.
Roller bearing defects may be classified as localized and
distributed. The defects such cracks, pits and spalls are
classified under localized defects and they are generated due
to fatigue on rolling surfaces created by contact stresses
between rolling elements under frictional force. The defects
such as surface roughness, waviness of contacting surfaces
and misaligned races are classified under distributed defects
and these defects may result from manufacturing error and
abrasive wear in bearings [4]. Each bearing defect will
produce specific vibration signature on the basis of the
severity and position of defect and this can be predicted by
mathematical analysis of vibration signals using advanced
software tools.
Vibration signature generated from a rolling element bearing
will be always complex in nature with its rolling components
such as bearing ball or cylinder, inner raceway, outer raceway
and cage, when these components rotate and interact together,
because of the presence of friction, it will generate complex
vibration signatures. In rolling element bearings industry
bearings are produced using very sophisticated and high
precision machine tools under strict norms and great quality
control, but like any other manufactured machine part they
will inevitably have a degree of imperfection. The amplitude
of this small surface imperfection may be in the order of
nanometers but significant vibrations in audible frequency
range can still be present in a good bearing. The level and
energy of the vibration is depended upon many factors, such
as the energy of the impact, the point at which the vibration is
measured, speed of rotation, heaviness of faults, tribological
conditions and the construction of the bearing. [5]
III. MEASUREMENT OF VIBRATION
Standard vibration signal measurement begins with collecting
an accurate time varying signal using an industry standard
vibration transducer, such as an accelerometer from a machine
component. For normal applications piezo-electric crystals are
used as transducers, which convert mechanical vibrations to
corresponding electrical voltage signals. Then the raw
vibrational signal is brought into a portable, digital measuring
instrument such as data acquisition system through data cables
and the signal can be processed for a variety of user required
functions with the help of some instruments [6]. Depending on
user requirements and the methodology of analysis one can
carry out different mathematical operations and processings
for conversion of raw signals to other units of vibration
measurements and it is also possible to change the domain of
vibration plots using this mathematical operations such as
FFT’s. Depending on the requirement and the intensity of the
raw signal, signal conditioning techniques such as high-pass
and low-pass filter series circuits, signal sampling and
averaging can be integrated with the measuring system for
better output in a fixed frequency range. If time domain
waveform analysis is desired for a particular condition
monitoring technique there is great importance in fixing
number of samples and the sample rate. [7] Most portable
vibration measuring instruments also incorporates an FFT
(Fast Fourier Transform) processing system which helps to
covert an overall time-varying input signal to corresponding
frequency domain and splitting it into its individual frequency
components. More advanced signal processing methods such
as power spectrum, auto-correlation, and log-spectrum are also
available in advanced signal processing software platforms
such as Lab-View.
IV. TIME DOMAIN METHOD
Vibration signals are primarily collected as a series of digital
values which indicates proximity, velocity or acceleration in
the time varying plot known as time domain. It helps to
display or analyse vibration data as a function of time. The
main specialty of the time domain signal format is that little or
no data are lost prior to inspection of vibration signal. The
vibration signals from a faulty bearing and good bearing
shows different vibration signature even after the
normalization, energy elimination and filtering of time domain
data [8]. The time domain signal can be used to analyze fault
and failure by analysing the vibration or acoustic data obtained
from the machine component. Statistical methods and feature
extraction are widely used to investigate the random
characteristics of a vibration signal generated from a physical
system. Feature extraction means the mathematical parameters
which represent the shape, peaks, randomness of a time
varying signal and it could be calculated using higher
derivatives of time domain signal.
Some of the vibration signal analysis techniques used to
analyse the time domain signal plots are categorised into the
following groups:
• Statistical parameters, which include Root Mean
Square (RMS), Kurtosis, Skewness, Variance and
Crest Factor
• Signal filter based methods include adaptive noise
cancelling (ANC), Prony-model and demodulation
etc.
• Time synchronous averaging based methods which
include Residual signal (RES), Difference signal
(DIFS), Time Synchronous Averaged (TSA) Signal
etc.
• Stochastic parameters also used for advanced signal
processing to analyse vibrations in the time domain.
 International Conference on Magnetics, Machines & Drives (AICERA-2014 iCMMD)
A feature to analyse a time domain signal is selected on the
basis of its ability to generate meaningful and useful plots and
summarize the collected data. Overall root-mean-square
(RMS) level and crest factor (ratio of peak value to RMS) are
the popular as well as the simplest methods adopted to analyse
time domain signal plots. But in the case of detection of
localized bearing defects, RMS method provides limited
success. So Statistical tools like kurtosis, symmetry,
correlation factor, Skewness and probability density properties
are also adopted along with RMS method for bearing fault
detection [9].
The idea suggested by Tahsin Doguer and Jens Strackeljan
[10] was that the time domain signal analysis can be done by
feature extraction of time varying signal by concentrating on
the properties of a particular part of the time signal in such a
way that the selected part should exhibit close relation to
possible bearing defects. This iteration is done by selecting a
peak in the time-varying signal which represents the presents
of local extreme in the measured acceleration signal collected
from desired rolling element bearing. After the selection of
local extreme peaks from the time domain signal which fulfil
the requirements of the peak definition and closely related to
bearing defects, significant information like peak position,
adjacent data points and amplitude are found then stored as a
time domain vibration signal. For the calculation of time
domain features the above iterated data sets can be used as
inputs and this will increase the accuracy index of the bearing
fault analysis, the speciality of this method is that the
fundamental properties of the time domain signal will not
change even after the normalization of signal data.
Apart from above methodologies time domain condition
monitoring systems widely use various and advanced
statistical methods to detect faults in machine components by
investigating random properties of measured data. Detailed
literature is available on time series diagnostic tools like RMS,
Crest Factor, Histograms, Kurtosis etc. see [11], [12], [13] and
[14].
Figure 1: A sample of time waveform [10]
Some of the relations between incipient bearing damages and
statistical parameters are explained below
• Peak value (PV): The simplest explanation is that it is
the peak level of vibration. Peal levels are indicative
of occurrence of local impacts in bearings
• Root Mean Square: RMS of a variant X is defined as
the square root of the mean squared value of X.
Studies indicates that the amount of energy in the
vibration signal is proportional to its RMS value
• Crest factor: The crest factor can be defined as the
ratio of the peak value to the RMS value, it yields the
information about the spikiness of the measured
signal. It is a pure number without any dimensions.
Crest factor indicates the existence of sharp peaks in
signal and its value is very sensitive towards signal
properties.
• Kurtosis: it is a statistical measure which indicates
the property of signal, whether the signal data are
peaked or flat relative to a normal distribution of
signal. In other words, kurtosis can be defined as the
standardized 4th central moment of a distribution.
Data sets with distinct peak near mean value, heavy
tail and decline rather rapidly with respect to mean
shows high kurtosis index. But signal data with flat
top near the mean shows low kurtosis index and this
kind of signal bears less number of sharp peaks.
• Skewness: Skewness is a measure of symmetry in a
distribution, in other words the lack of symmetry.
Skewness for a normal distribution is zero since it is
highly symmetric and data with Skewness near to
zero shows higher degree of symmetry. Skewness of
bearing vibration signal indicates the position an
orientation of defect
V. FREQUENCY DOMAIN METHOD
Among vibration signature monitoring and analysis techniques
frequency domain method is more dominant in industries. The
main advantage in frequency domain vibration analysis is that
one can easily gather early information’s about bearing fault
propagation and other issues by investigating frequency
domain characteristics of vibration signature and comparing
acquired data with base line or normal state frequency
spectrum data. This type of life predicting analysis is well
known as trend analysis.
When a rolling element in antifriction bearings rotates at fixed
RPM, there will be a relative motion between bearing
components such as ball, outer race, inner race and cage.
These relative motions under contact stresses generate
vibration frequencies as per the rotational speed of each
bearing component. The frequency of vibration generated also
depends upon the bearing design specifications such as pitch
diameter, ball diameter, number of balls and contact angle. It
 International Conference on Magnetics, Machines & Drives (AICERA-2014 iCMMD)
is noted that a brand new bearing too produce vibration signals
in audible frequency range and this frequencies known as
fundamental frequencies, they are ball pass frequency outer
(BPFO), ball pass frequency inner (BPFI), rolling element
defect frequency (REDF) and fundamental train frequency
(FTF) respectively. Any frequency above the fundamental
frequency indicates some faults in the bearing. These specific
fundamental defect frequencies of antifriction bearings can be
calculated from the equations, formulated by Chaudhary and
Tandon [15], namely
i. Ball passing frequency of outer race
ii. Ball passing frequency of inner race
iii. Ball spin frequency
iv. Fundamental train frequency
Where,
n = number of balls
N= bearing rotation in rpm
d= ball diameter in mm
D= bearing pitch diameter in mm
β=bearing contact angle in degree
From the above equations one can find the fundamental
frequencies of a good roller bearing.
Initiation and progression of faults in antifriction rolling
element bearing generate specific and predictable
characteristic of vibration. Defective bearing rotating at fixed
RPM generates specific frequency of vibration. The bearing
fault may be a crack, pit, wear mark, scratch or spall on the
bearing component. Due to the presence of these
imperfections, the bearing surfaces in contact generate
vibration signals at a frequency higher than that of
fundamental frequency. A maintenance engineer can check the
frequency spectrum and identify the defects in bearing by
comparing spectrum with its fundamental frequencies. This
condition monitoring technique is explained with a typical
industrial example.
Figure 2 shows frequency spectrum of a roller bearing in good
condition and another spectrum of bearing with a fault in outer
race. The fundamental outer race frequency of the bearing is
74.77 Hz (calculated from fundamental frequency equation).
Figure 2: Frequency spectrum of a roller bearing [16]
From the frequency spectrum of bearing one can identify the
peaks of spectrum that exceeds the fundamental frequency and
hence it is easy to predict an inner race defect in a bearing. In
the same manner one can predict defects on outer race, defects
on balls, defects on cage etc. More details of bearing defects
can be formulated by using vibration spectrum through
investigating about the rapidness of higher peaks and range of
frequency. The harmonics of defect frequency will confirm the
defect and the sidebands will appear when there is more than
one defect. One reason for the shift in the defect frequency is
due to the orientation or complete failure of the components of
bearing and another reason is the presence of defects in the
light load or no load region. In case of local bearings, the peak
may be observed in the spectrum even when the bearing is
new. One of the reasons for that may be lack of surface finish.
The defects are usually due to the errors in the machining
process or sub-standard material. Even the tolerances in case
of local bearing are not met as compared to standard bearings.
Bearing condition monitoring is one of the thrust areas in the
condition monitoring scenario. The signals collected at the
bearing housing contains not only the defect frequencies of the
bearing only but it also contains the signals due to imbalance,
misalignment, gear mesh and so on. Donald D Howieson [17]
has explained the basic steps in developing a technique for
bearing condition monitoring. An enveloping is a two-step
process. The first step involves the band pass filtering of the
time domain signal using band pass filter to avoid unwanted
noise frequencies from bearing and this will iterate the high
frequency energy peaks which are impacts from the rolling
 International Conference on Magnetics, Machines & Drives (AICERA-2014 iCMMD)
elements hitting the defects as the bearing rotates. The second
step involves passing this filtered time signal through an
envelope in order to extract the repetition rate of spiky bursts
of energy i.e. rate of impacts. The enveloper is a circuit that
demodulate or rectifies the signal. The FFT spectrum of this
enveloped signal displays the bearing characteristic frequency
and its harmonics.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
Vibration signature analysis of rolling element bearing is a
very advanced and sophisticated method adopted in
maintenance engineering field. It provides the advantages such
as reducing production down time, improving maintenance
efficiency, reduce the danger coefficient in the industry.
Hence good condition monitoring and predictive maintenances
results in great product quality and low maintenance cost.
Time domain and frequency domain signal spectrum provide
useful information to analyse generation and progression of
faults in rolling element bearings which may not be able
identified with naked eyes. Time waveform indicates severity
of defects in bearings by statistical analysis of time domain
signal data. Frequency domain spectrum brings more details
about bearing faults such as type, mode, growth and position
of defect through analysing amplitudes corresponding to
defect frequencies. Comparing defect frequencies with
fundamental bearing frequencies will reveal more details
about bearing faults.
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Naseel Ibnu Azeez, Received B.E degree
from FEAT Annamalai University,
Chidambaram and pursuing M-Tech in
Machine Design from Amal Jyothi College
of Engineering. Kanjirapally, Kerala. His
research interests includes Condition
monitoring, Vibration and Tribology.
Ashwin Chandy Alex, Received his B-
Tech In Mechanical Engineering and M-
Tech In Machine Designing from Saintgits
College of Engineering, Pathamuttom. His
research interests includes Machine
Designing, Vibration and Composites