Rolling-element bearings are widely used in the industries today, and hence 

Rolling-element bearings are widely used in the industries today, and hence maintenance of these bearings becomes an important task for the maintenance professionals. The rolling-element bearings wear out easily due to metal-to-metal contact, which creates faults in the outer race, inner race and ball. It is also the most vulnerable component of a machine because it is often under high load and high running speed conditions. Regular diagnostics of rolling-element bearing faults is critical for industrial safety and operations of the machines along with reducing the maintenance costs or avoiding shutdown time. Among the outer race, inner race and ball, the outer race tends to be more vulnerable to faults and defects.

There is still room for discussion as to whether the rolling element excites the natural frequencies of bearing component when it passes the fault on the outer race. Hence we need to identify the bearing outer race natural frequency and its harmonics. The bearing faults create impulses and results in strong harmonics of the fault frequencies in the spectrum of vibration signals. These fault frequencies are sometimes masked by adjacent frequencies in the spectra due to their little energy. Hence, a very high spectral resolution is often needed to identify these frequencies during a FFT analysis. The natural frequencies of a rolling element bearing with the free boundary conditions are 3 kHz. Therefore, in order to use the bearing component resonance bandwidth method to detect the bearing fault at an initial stage a high frequency range accelerometer should be adopted, and data obtained from a long duration needs to be acquired. A fault characteristic frequency can only be identified when the fault extent is severe, such as that of a presence of a hole in the outer race. The harmonics of fault frequency is a more sensitive indicator of a bearing outer race fault. For a more serious detection of defected bearing faults waveform, spectrum and envelope techniques will help reveal these faults. However, if a high frequency demodulation is used in the envelope analysis in order to detect bearing fault characteristic frequencies, the maintenance professionals have to be more careful in the analysis because of resonance, as it may or may not contain fault frequency components.

Using spectral analysis as a tool to identify the faults in the bearings faces challenges due to issues like low energy, signal smearing, cyclostationarity etc. High resolution is often desired to differentiate the fault frequency components from the other high-amplitude adjacent frequencies. Hence, when the signal is sampled for FFT analysis, the sample length should be large enough to give adequate frequency resolution in the spectrum. Also, keeping the computation time and memory within limits and avoiding unwanted aliasing may be demanding. However, a minimal frequency resolution required can be obtained by estimating the bearing fault frequencies and other vibration frequency components and its harmonics due to shaft speed, misalignment, line frequency, gearbox etc.