Abstract: According to frequent bearing faults occurred in the ranging boom of the coal shearer and seriously affected to the present safety production status of th e coal mining face, the bearing fault diagnosis of the ranging boom in the coal shearer was conducted based the vibration signals analysis. In order to correctly distingui sh the bearing fault of the ranging boom, the integrated empirical mode decomposition method was applied to explain the original vibration signals. The percentage of t he first eight intrinsic mode functions energy in the total signal energy was selected as the fault feature information and then inputted to the support vector machine for t he fault mode distinguishment. The experiment results showed that the combined integrated empirical mode decomposition and the fault diagnosis method of the suppo rt vector machine could be suitable to process the unstable and nonlinear vibration signals occurred from the bearing in the ranging boom of the coal shearer. The total fault distinguishing rate was 88. 33% and a correct diagnosis of the bearing fault could be realized.