Oscillatory Lempel–Ziv Complexity Calculation as a Nonlinear Measure for Continuous Monitoring of Bearing Health

As a nonlinear measure, Lempel–Ziv complexity (LZC) can be considered as a suitable parameter for characterizing bearing health status by measuring the complexity of vibration signals. However, in continuous monitoring scenario under noisy condition, all components of a multicomponent bearing signal are not equally sensitive toward a change of LZC value. As a result, a direct application of LZC for bearing health monitoring not only suffers from its inefficient early fault warning but also fails to infer the fault progression. In this article, instead of direct utilization of a whole vibration signal, its fundamental component (FC) sensitive to LZC calculation is separated with the help of continuously adjustable parameterized tunable
$Q$
factor wavelet transform (TQWT). In this context, a study based on sparsity indices has been done for
$Q$
factor selection of TQWT. Since TQWT uses an oscillation-based bearing FC separation scheme for LZC calculation, the proposed measure is termed as oscillatory Lempel–Ziv complexity (OLZC). Two experimental cases are used for validation. Performance of OLZC is compared with original LZC, representative sparsity indices and recently proposed multiscale symbolic Lempel–Ziv complexity. Results demonstrate that the proposed OLZC can not only overcome the limitations of the original LZC but also performs better than other indices in comparison to continuous monitoring of bearing health.