SUMMARY
In this paper, we propose a novel framework for the diagnosis of incipient bearing faults and trend prediction of weak faults which result in gradual aggravation with the bearing vibration intensity as the characteristic parameter. For the weak fault diagnosis, the proposed framework adopts the improved minimum entropy deconvolution (MED) theory to identify the weak fault characteristics of mechanical equipment. From a large number of actual data analysis, once a bearing shows a weak fault, the bearing vibration intensity not only has random non-stationary, but also long-range dependent (LRD) characteristics. Therefore, the stochastic model with LRD-fractional Brown motion (FBM) is proposed to evaluate and predict the condition of slowly varying bearing faults which is a gradual process from weak fault occurrence to severity. For the FBM stochastic model, we mainly implement the derivation and the parameter identification of the FBM model. This is the first study to slowly fault prediction with stochastic model FBM. Experimental results show that the proposed methods can obtain the best performance in incipient fault diagnosis and bearing condition trend prediction.