See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/286816493

Bearing fault detection with the use of acoustic signals recorded by a hand-
held mobile phone

Conference Paper · December 2015

DOI: 10.1109/CATCON.2015.7449545

CITATIONS READS

20 4,121

6 authors, including:

Maciej Orman Pawel Rzeszucinski

ABB China ABB
25 PUBLICATIONS   161 CITATIONS    26 PUBLICATIONS   136 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Karthik Krishnamoorthi Cajetan Pinto

ABB ABB
3 PUBLICATIONS   21 CITATIONS    31 PUBLICATIONS   209 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

EUCAMS gear partnership View project

Special Issue on Diagnosis and Fault Detection in Electrical Machines, Drives and Industrial Process - World Journal of Engineering and Technology View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Maciej Orman on 14 December 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Bearing fault detection with the use of acoustic
signals recorded by a hand-held mobile phone
Maciej Orman
ABB Ltd.
ABB Corporate Research Center
Shanghai, P.R. China
maciej.orman@cn.abb.com
Karthik Krishnamoorthi, Cajetan T. Pinto
ABB Motor and Generator Service
Mumbai, India
cajetan.t.pinto@in.abb.com,
karthik.kr@in.abb.com
Abstract — It is well know that bearings are the most often
failing elements of electric motors. Percentage of bearing failures
vs. other failures is even more significant for the case of low
voltage motors. At the same time diagnostics of rolling element
bearings constitutes a well-established part of the rotating
machinery condition monitoring domain. In many cases,
however, the cost of installing a high-end accelerometer-based
bearing condition monitoring system, which is currently the most
common approach in the industry, might be difficult to justify on
non-critical machinery due to potentially long payback period of
the investment. Therefore, still the very first diagnostic is often
performed by human ear and the assessment of the nature of the
emitted sound. Considering an example of electric motors, it is
typically the abnormal or excessive sound that is first recognized
by the operators as the indicator of faulty motor operating
condition. This text investigates the possibility of performing
condition monitoring of rolling element bearings based on
acoustic signals recorded by a standard and easily accessible
mobile phone. The main difficulty in using mobile phone-
embedded microphone for rotating machinery diagnostic
purposes is the fact that the frequency response of the mobile
phone microphone is very poor (below 200 Hz) where typically
the bearing fault frequencies lie. The results seem to indicate that
given an appropriate signal processing approach is taken, it is
possible to indicate the presence of faults in the bearings.
Keywords — rolling element bearing, condition monitoring,
Spectral kurtosis, Hilbert transform, mobile phone
I. INTRODUCTION
Recently, acoustic analysis has attracted more and more
attention and it has been applied in many fields, for example,
speech recognition, nevertheless still very rarely it is applied in
industrial environment for condition monitoring purposes [1],
[2]. This is mainly due to the fact that investment in acoustic
system might not be rational when low cost accelerometer
based system are available. Typically accelerometer-based
systems are also widely accepted in industry as a standard since
Pawel Rzeszucinski, Agnieszka Tkaczyk
ABB Corporate Research Center
Krakow, Poland
pawel.rzeszucinski@pl.abb.com,
agnieszka.tkaczyk@pl.abb.com
Maciej Sulowicz
Cracow Technical University
ABB Corporate Research Center
Krakow, Poland
pesulowi@cyf-kr.edu.pl
they are not suffering of background noise as much as
microphone based system. However, for non-critical and less
expensive applications, the cost of installing a special
diagnostic system might be greater than the cost of the
monitored element itself e.g. in the case of low voltage (LV)
electric motors. Therefore such an approach cannot be justified.
For this reason, there is a need to investigate non-standard
approaches for performing initial diagnostic of non-critical
machines. The motivation was to allow on-site service
technicians to be able to utilize their everyday use mobile
phone for ad-hoc diagnostic purposes both in terms of data
acquisition as well as on-board signal processing and by that
significantly reduce the cost of such service. Modern mobile
phones or smart phones are nowadays carried by every member
of the service personnel for communication purposes. At the
same time, the embedded microphones used for regular phone
calls have operational characteristics, like the sampling
frequency of 44.1 kHz that allow for acoustic signals related to
rotating machinery operations to be fully represented.
Several attempts on using acoustic analysis for condition
monitoring of electric motors have been reported in the past 0 -
[5]. However, the number of work related to this subject
compared with the amount of research related to the analysis
based on vibration or electric current is negligible. In this
paper, the feasibility of using acoustic signals recorded by
standard mobile phones for detection of rolling elements faults
is presented. The measurements were taken with a mobile
phone equipped with a dedicated application specifically for
the purpose of recording, acoustic signals collected by the
embedded mobile phone microphone. With the inherent
limitations of the standard microphones embedded in mobile
phones some signal processing techniques, Spectral kurtosis
and Hilbert transform were used to enhance the results of the
investigation. The results of the measurements may suggest
that the mobile phone-based sound measurements contain
sufficient information not only to distinguish between healthy
and faulty case, but also to determine the specific bearing fault
type.
II. ROLLING ELEMENT BEARING FAULT TYPES
Rolling element bearings can suffer from four fundamental
types of faults or the combination of them:
• Outer race fault where the surface of the outer race of
the bearing develops a fault - BPFO
• Inner race fault where the surface of the inner race of
the bearing deteriorates - BPFI
• Rolling element fault where the element rolling
operating between the inner and the outer race
develops a fault - BSF
• Cage frequency where the cage which holds the
rolling elements e.g. balls gets damaged - FTF
Since this text deals with the detection of the outer race fault,
the characteristic frequency of interest is the BPFO. The outer
race is fixed in the motor and does not rotate with the shaft,
and so the BPFO is the only bearing fault frequency expected
in the spectrum (unlike e.g. BSF fault, where often the
characteristic frequencies gets modulated by FTF frequency
due to mechanical relations of the two). Equation (1) provides
a formula for determination the BPFO [6]:
procedure was to hold the device at a distance of around 10
cm from the motor and point the microphone towards the
measured surface. The sampling frequency of the recorded
waveforms was 44.1 kHz and each measurement lasted 10
seconds. In addition to the acoustic measurements, vibration
data was recorded for reference purposes by the ABB
MACHsense Data Acquisition Unit equipped with the CTC
AC192 accelerometer of sensitivity 100 mV/g. The duration of
the measurement was also 10 s and the sampling frequency
was also fixed at 44.1 kHz.
The bearings under investigation were FAG 6306-2RSR.
The nominal characteristic fault frequency of BPFO condition
associated with the bearing is 3.0347 1/s, as provided on the
manufacturer website.
Fig. 1 The test rig used during the tests

N ⎛ Bd cos α ⎞ (1)
BPFO = ⋅ N b ⎜1 − ⎟
120 ⎝ Pd ⎠

where N is the rotational speed of the inner race, Nb is the

number of rolling elements, Bd is the diameter of the rolling
element, Pd is the bearing pitch diameter and α is the rolling
element contact angle.

III. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND DATA ACQUISITION Fig. 2 Fault seeded in the outer race of the bearing

The data subject to analysis in this text was generated on a
test rig shown in Fig. 1. The entire shaft line was composed
of a 4.0 kW induction motor (nominal speed of 1430 RPM)
(Driving Motor) which rotated a 4.5 kW DC generator which
was loading the system (Loading DC Generator). The two
elements were coupled by means of two flexible couplings
(Flexible Couplings) and a torque meter between them which
was used as an encoder (Torque Meter With Encoder) to
precisely determine the speed of the shaft. The data comes
from two operating conditions of the driving motor: with the
drive side of the motor having a healthy bearing and the same
bearing but with seeded outer race fault. The fault was seeded
by grinding off small part of the outer race surface with the
use of a precise grinding machine, in order to simulate realistic
fault mode. The result can be seen in Fig. 2. The
measurements were conducted on the drive side of the motor
with the use of a mobile phone equipped with an application
developed in-house specifically for the purpose of recording
acoustic signals from the embedded microphone. The
IV. ACOUSTIC SIGNAL ANALYSIS
A. Signal processing approach
The investigation carried out on raw acoustic spectra
immediately showed the drawback of using mobile phone for
industrial acoustic measurements – the low-order harmonics of
the fundamental shaft rotational speed were virtually invisible
and the higher-order harmonics appeared as dominating the
signal (see Fig. 3). This is caused by the frequency response
function of the embedded mobile phone microphone which is
designed to limit the amount of redundant information and
focus only in the frequency range useful for human voice
transmission. This rarely translates to data below 200 Hz. For
this reason, no signatures of bearing characteristic frequency
should be expected in the raw spectrum of the acoustic
measurement.

Fig. 3 A typical spectrum of a raw acoustic signal recorded by a mobile
phone-embedded microphone.
When the outer race of the bearing gets deteriorated, it often
leads to substantial amounts of material being removed from
the surface, creating craters of initially sharp edges (which can
smoothen out with time). When a rolling element comes in
contact with such surface on the bearing race, an event of
impulsive nature is generated. Since an impulse excites a
frequency band close to white noise, it also excites the
resonant frequencies of the bearing (but not only) structure
[10]. The resonant frequencies will be modulated at the
frequencies corresponding to the given bearing fault type.
Based on this, one of the typical approaches in the field of
bearing fault diagnostics is to amplitude demodulate the
frequency region around the resonance of the bearing and
analyze the spectral content of the modulating function,
looking for the bearing fault frequencies. At the same time,
however, the theoretical value of the bearing resonant
frequencies is often inaccessible and so the optimal region for
demodulation needs to be determined by other means.
Therefore, a well-established approach often used in the
vibration-based bearing diagnostic routines has been used to
look for bearing fault signatures in the higher frequency
regions. It is based on post-processing the data with the use of
the Spectral kurtosis and Hilbert transform techniques. The
signals from accelerometer are subject to the same processing
routine for reference purposes. The proposed signal processing
approach has been used to search for clearer and more
straightforward indication of faults. Spectral kurtosis is a
statistical tool capable of indicating the optimal filtering band
for detection of a series of transient in the signal and their
clearest activity in the given frequency region [7]. More
specifically, Spectral kurtosis leads to generation of kurtogram
– a three dimensional representation of the Spectral kurtosis
output, where the X axis is the frequency band of the signal, Y
axis is the decomposition level of the signal and Z axis is the
magnitude of kurtosis metric, applied on the signal filtered in
the given frequency region on the given decomposition level.
This can be thought of as a useful tool for blind identification
of detection filters for diagnostics [8]. Hilbert transform allows
to perform the amplitude demodulation of the signal, extracting
the modulating frequency components of the signal [9]. The
vibration signals are subject to analogous signal processing, for
reference purposes.
B. Results
This section shows the processed spectra of both the vibration
and acoustic data recorded from motor running with healthy
and faulty bearing. The x-axis in all figures is limited to the
range 0-200 Hz for clarity.
1) Healthy bearing
Fig. 4 is the spectrum of the envelope of vibration signal
recorded on a healthy bearing and filtered in the frequency
band 8.59 kHz – 10.21 kHz which has been indicated by the
Spectral kurtosis as containing the most impulsive content.
Nevertheless, it can be seen that the dominant peaks in the
spectrum originate from the motor shaft rotational speed
which, based on readings from the encoder, was
corresponding to the frequency of 24.01 Hz. Similar frequency
content can be seen in a spectrum of a signal recorded by a
mobile phone, this time filtered in the range 17.65 kHz –
22.05 kHz (Fig. 5). Here even more shaft rotational speed
harmonics can be seen, and no other frequency components
stand out from the spectrum. The other immediate observation
that can be made by comparing spectra in Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 is
that the latter, based on acoustic signal, shows a much clearer
presence of the shaft rotational-related components. This can
be explained by the presence of the two flexible couplings in
the system and the noise it was generating, probably due to
being imperfectly aligned. These disturbances are more
prominent in the acoustic signal due to the close proximity of
the microphone and the couplings. At the same time, the
influence of the coupling on the vibration signals is much
smaller while the signals get attenuated on the way from the
coupling to the accelerometer sensor, however, some influence
can still be observed. Also one may see that the optimal
filtering frequency bands differ for vibration and acoustic
signals, and this is entirely in accordance with the expectation
since the nature of the airborne and structure borne signals are
significantly different.
Interestingly, when the acoustic signal gets filtered in the
frequency band optimal for the vibration signal (shown in Fig.
6, the results are similar to the ones shown in Fig. 5. This is as
expected, since for the healthy signal the different frequency
bands should not be significantly different, and for a healthy
system which is not perfectly aligned, the only expected
components should be originating from the rotational speed of
the shaft. Nevertheless the optimal frequency band, as
indicated by Spectral kurtosis seems slightly less noisy and all
speed harmonics are clearly present (Fig. 6), which is not the
case in the non-optimal band (Fig. 5).
It should be noted here that the influence of the system on
the acoustic signal might constitute a limitation of the
proposed approach and, as a result, background noise and
signals originating from other machine types might influence
the robustness of the analysis. At the same time the correct
positioning of the mobile phone by the operator with respect
to the rotating elements might be critical for correct data
acquisition and, if done correctly, might diminish the
influence of the external components.

Fig. 4 Envelope spectrum of acceleration signal from a healthy bearing band
pass filtered in the band 8.59 kHz - 10.21 kHz
Fig. 5 Envelope spectrum of an acoustic signal from a healthy bearing band
pass filtered in the band 17.65 kHz – 22.05 kHz
Fig. 6 Envelope spectrum of acoustic signal from a healthy bearing band pass
filtered in the band 8.59 kHz - 10.21 kHz
2) Outer race fault
The introduction of the bearing outer race fault lead to
significant changes in the nature of acoustic as well as
vibration signals. The characteristic fault frequency for the
bearing fault was 72.86 Hz (3.0347 . 24.01 Hz). Fig. 7 and Fig.
8 show the spectra of the envelope of vibration and acoustic
signals respectively filtered in the optimal frequency bands as
indicated by the Spectral kurtosis. In both cases, the BPFO
and its second harmonic stand out from the signal very clearly.
In acoustic signal also a rotational frequency component
marks its presence which might again be related with the
operating principle of the flexible coupling in the system. This
component is not visible in the vibration signal; however for
diagnostic purposes this difference does not constitute any
issues.
Similarly to the case of the healthy bearing, the acoustic signal
containing signatures of BPFO has been subject to filtering in
the band which was optimal for the vibration signal (Fig. 9). It
can be seen that the frequency components characteristic for
the fault, although still visible in the spectrum, seem less clear,
and the dominant frequency is related to the shaft rotational
speed (along with a number of its lower-amplitude
harmonics). In contrast to the healthy case, using the optimal
filtering band plays an important role in determining the
clearest possible signatures of the bearing fault.
Fig. 7 Envelope spectrum of an accelerometer signal from a bearing with the
outer race fault (BPFO) band pass filtered in the band 11.70 kHz – 15.49 kHz
Fig. 8 Envelope spectrum of an acoustic signal from a bearing with the outer
race fault (BPFO) band pass filtered in the band 16.55 kHz – 19.29 kHz

Fig. 9 Envelope spectrum of acoustic signal from a bearing with the outer race
fault (BPFO) band pass filtered in the band 11.70 kHz – 15.49 kHz
V. CONCLUSIONS
The material contained in this paper presented the results of
investigation aimed at assessing whether acoustic signal
measurements performed by means of a modern mobile phone
would be sufficient to indicate the presence of an outer race
fault in a rolling element bearing. The measurements were
carried out under two different running conditions of an
induction motor: operated with a healthy bearing on the drive
side, and a bearing suffering from the BPFO type of fault.
Using mobile phone-embedded microphone for rotating
machinery diagnostic purposes carries an inherent limitation in
that the frequency response of the microphone is very poor in
the low frequency bands, typical for LV motor operating
regions. This is because human voice does not carry important
information in this band, and so to avoid redundant data
transmission, the low frequency components are not taken into
consideration, thus neglected at the microphone selection
stage for the mobile. Therefore a well-established approach
often used in the vibration-based bearing diagnostic routines
has been used to look for bearing fault signatures in the higher
frequency regions. It is based on post-processing the data with
View publication stats
the use of the Spectral kurtosis and Hilbert transform
techniques and, in essence, look for signatures of impulsive
content in the higher parts of the frequency spectrum. The
presented results strongly support the idea that the modern
mobile phone can be used for bearing fault detection, based on
acoustic signals recorded by the embedded microphone. It has
also been shown that the selection of the optimal filtering band
for the given signal type (different filtering bands indicated by
Spectral kurtosis for vibration and acoustic signal) plays an
important role in finding the clearest signatures of the bearing
fault. In general it can be concluded that the results of the
investigation may suggest that the detection of the bearing
faults may be possible with the use of mobile phone based
acoustic measurements.
REFERENCES
[1] Orman M., Pinto C. T, “Usage of acoustic camera for condition
monitoring of electric motors”, IEEE TENCON, October 22-25, 2013,
Xian, China
[2] Orman M., Pinto C. T, “Acoustic analysis of electric motors in noisy
industrial environment” 12th IMEKO TC10 Workshop on Technical
Diagnostics New Perspectives in Measurements, Tools and Techniques
for Industrial Applications, June 6-7, 2013, Florence, Italy
[3] Van Riesen D., Schlensok C., Henrotte F., Hameyer K. “Acoustic
measurement for detecting manufacturing faults in electrical machines”,
17th International Conference on Electrical Machines ICEM, 2006
[4] Verma S. P., W. Li: “Measurement of vibrations and radiated acoustic
noise of electrical machines“, 6th International Conference on Electrical
Machines and Systems ICEMS, Vol. 2, pp. 861-866, 2003
[5] Gaylard A., Meyer A., Landy C. A. “Acoustic evaluation of faults in
electrical machines“, 7th International Conference on Electrical
Machines and Drives, pp. 147 -150, 2005
[6] Mohanty, A.R., Machinery Condition Monitoring: Principles and
Practices, CRC Press, 2015.
[7] Antoni, J. The spectral kurtosis: a useful tool for characterizing non-
stationary signals, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 20: 282-
307, 2006.
[8] Barszcz, T., Randall, R.B. Application of spectral kurtosis for detection
of a tooth crack in the planetary gear of a wind turbine, Mechanical
Systems and Signal Processing 23: 1352 – 1365, 2009.
[9] Randall, R.B. Frequency analysis, Bruel & Kjaer 3rd edition, 1987.
[10] Goldman, S., Vibration Spectrum Analysis: A Practical Approach,
Industrial Press Inc, 1999.