An Industrial Case Study of Rolling-Element Bearing Condition Monitoring Using CEEMDAN-Based Hilbert Spectral Analysis Cross-Checked Against Fourier Spectra

Abstract

Rolling-element bearings are a leading cause of unplanned downtime in continuous-process manufacturing, and the migration toward Industry 4.0 condition-based maintenance (CBM) has intensified the need for diagnostic methods evaluated on real in-service assets. This paper reports an exploratory, longitudinal single-asset industrial field demonstration of Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (CEEMDAN)-based Hilbert spectral analysis for rolling-element bearing condition monitoring. An in-service bearing on a critical production machine was monitored over eight measurements spanning approximately four months and analyzed with the Hilbert–Huang Transform, using CEEMDAN in place of the classical Empirical Mode Decomposition to suppress mode mixing. The Hilbert spectra tracked the evolution of the bearing’s vibration signature as a growing concentration of vibration amplitude in a stable band of the 0–400 Hz analysis window (approximately 280–380 Hz); because the analysis characterizes the distribution of amplitude within the band rather than resolving discrete defect lines, this is reported as band-amplitude trending, and the band is treated as compatible with bearing-related excitation rather than attributed to a specific kinematic fault frequency. At the final pre-replacement measurement (M8), a bounded consistency cross-check against a conventional single-sided Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) amplitude spectrum computed from the same exported waveform recovered co-located dominant content. This establishes cross-method consistency for the measurement examined, but does not independently validate diagnostic correctness or the full campaign trend. Interpretability of the representation is argued qualitatively and remains to be tested. The contribution is therefore the documented field application and its explicit consistency cross-check procedure; applicability beyond this asset and its operating conditions requires multi-asset evaluation.