Abstract: In order to solve the problems that the fault feature of rolling bearing in early failure period
is difficult to extract, a method for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings based on multi-correlation
variational mode decomposition (MC-VMD) was presented. First, vibration signal is jointly acquired
through multiple acceleration sensors and the multi-correlation process is made for the signal in order
to prominent fault signal characteristics. Then VMD was used to decompose the fault signal into
several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and then the IMF of biggest related kurtosis was analyzed by
the spectral kurtosis and envelope demodulation. Finally identify the working status and fault type of
rolling bearings through envelope spectrum. The proposed method was applied to actual signals. The
results show that this method enables accurate diagnosis of rolling bearing fault, the analysis results
demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Key words: multi-correlation, variational mode decomposition, rolling bearing, kurtosis criterion