Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Research Articles

Vibration characterization of rolling bearings with compound fault features under multiple interference factors.

As a key component of rotating machinery power transmission system, rolling bearings in gas turbines are often required to serve in complex working conditions such as the high speed, the heavy load, the variable load, the variable rotational speed, and so on. The signals of bearing failures are easily drowned out by strong background noise and disturbances of related components. In the mechanical transmission system, the signals of bearing failures are easily submerged by the strong background noise and the disturbance of related components, especially for the composite bearing failures, which seriously hinders the effective identification of the vibration characteristics of the bearing operating state and increases the difficulty of fault diagnosis. In order to investigate the impact of interference on the bearing, through the establishment of rolling bearing composite fault vibration model, analyze the relationship between the vibration signals caused by different types of bearing failures and the corresponding vibration characteristics, to reveal the transmission system of the parts of the perturbation of the main multi-interference factors on the bearing fault signal influence law. The experimental verification shows that disturbance yp(t) caused by the sum of gear meshing frequency, and installation errors of the shaft, and coupling in the transmission system and background noise ni(t), which makes the fault frequency relatively weak and difficult to observe, and makes it difficult to accurately separate the fault information of the bearing. It provides a theoretical basis to solve the problem of damage identification and fault diagnosis of rolling bearings under multi-interference state.

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis based on multi-domain features and whale optimized support vector machine

Rolling bearing is an important rotating support component in mechanical equipment. It is very prone to wear, defects, and other faults, which directly affect the reliable operation of mechanical equipment. Its running condition monitoring and fault diagnosis have always been a matter of concern to engineers and researchers. A rolling bearing fault diagnosis technique based on multi-domain feature and whale optimization algorithm-support vector machine (MDF-WOA-SVM) is proposed. Firstly, recursive analysis is performed on vibration signal and the recursive features are employed as nonlinear recursive feature vector including recursive rate (RR), deterministic rate (DET), recursive entropy (RE), and diagonal average length (DAL). Then, a comprehensive multi-domain feature vector is constructed by combining three time-domain features including root mean square, variance, and peak to peak. Finally, whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is introduced to optimize the penalty factor C and kernel function parameter g to construct the optimal WOA-SVM model. The rolling bearing datasets of Jiangnan University is employed for instance analysis, and the results show that the 10-CV accuracy of the technique proposed is good with an accuracy of 99%. Compared with recursive features or time-domain features, multi-domain features are more accurate and comprehensive in describing characters of the signal. Some popular supervised learning models are also introduced for comparison including K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and decision tree (DT), and the result shows that the proposed method has a higher accuracy and certain advantages.

Manifold assistant multi-modal multi-objective differential evolution algorithm and its application in actual rolling bearing fault diagnosis

The fault diagnosis of rotating mechanical systems is crucial for ensuring the reliability of industrial equipment. In actual industrial scenarios, different combinations of fault features may yield the same diagnostic accuracy, but the difficulty and cost of obtaining different features generally vary. Therefore, in the feature extraction process, if multiple optimal feature combinations can be provided to decision-makers, it would be beneficial to select the feature subsets with lower computational cost or measurement difficulty that achieve the same fault diagnosis performance. Therefore, we model the fault feature selection task as a multi-modal multi-objective optimization problem (MMOP). To better solve MMOPs, a manifold assistant multi-modal multi-objective differential evolution (MA-MMODE) algorithm is proposed. It can establish a regularity model based on the distribution of the population to generate offspring and approximate the true Pareto set. Subsequently, this paper presents a preselection strategy that considers the distributions of both the decision space and objective space. The proposed preselection strategy can ensure that individuals with more promising solutions enter the mating pool to generate new offspring, thus exploring the search space more comprehensively. Using the CEC 2019 test set, the proposed MA-MMODE is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, and the experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, based on two real rolling bearing testbeds, the proposed MA-MMODE is applied for feature selection in actual fault diagnosis. The experimental results show that the proposed MA-MMODE can provide multiple equivalent feature subsets to decision-makers while effectively improving the fault diagnosis accuracy for rolling bearings.

SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) for Efficient Feature Selection in Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis

This study introduces an efficient methodology for addressing fault detection, classification, and severity estimation in rolling element bearings. The methodology is structured into three sequential phases, each dedicated to generating distinct machine-learning-based models for the tasks of fault detection, classification, and severity estimation. To enhance the effectiveness of fault diagnosis, information acquired in one phase is leveraged in the subsequent phase. Additionally, in the pursuit of attaining models that are both compact and efficient, an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) technique is incorporated to meticulously select optimal features for the machine learning (ML) models. The chosen ML technique for the tasks of fault detection, classification, and severity estimation is the support vector machine (SVM). To validate the approach, the widely recognized Case Western Reserve University benchmark is utilized. The results obtained emphasize the efficiency and efficacy of the proposal. Remarkably, even with a highly limited number of features, evaluation metrics consistently indicate an accuracy of over 90% in the majority of cases when employing this approach.

Improved 2-D Multiscale Fractional Dispersion Entropy: A Novel Health Condition Indicator for Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings

Improved 2-D Multiscale Fractional Dispersion Entropy: A Novel Health Condition Indicator for Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings

Imbalanced data fault diagnosis of rolling bearings using enhanced relative generative adversarial network

Imbalanced data fault diagnosis of rolling bearings using enhanced relative generative adversarial network

Fault diagnosis for rolling bearings based on generalised dispersive mode decomposition and accugram

Bearing fault diagnosis helps to ensure the safe operation of electromechanical equipment and reduce unnecessary losses due to downtime. The interference of noise in the signal poses a challenge in the effective identification of rolling bearing faults. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a rolling bearing fault diagnosis (RBFD) method based on generalised dispersive mode decomposition (GDMD) and an accugram. Firstly, the bearing signal is decomposed using GDMD and the optimal number of decomposition modes is chosen using a new index based on the correlation coefficient and accuracy. According to the number of determined decomposition modes, the fault signal is reconstructed. Then, the centre frequency and bandwidth of the resonant frequency are determined using an accugram. Finally, the fault signal is filtered and analysed using a square envelope spectrum to achieve rolling bearing fault diagnosis. Experimental signal analysis verifies the effectiveness and feasibility of the method. The method is applied to the early fault diagnosis of rolling bearings and compared with kurtogram and accugram results. The results show that the approach can not only effectively avoid the interference of external impacts but it can also correctly recognise the fault characteristic frequency band.

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis based on RQA with STD and WOA-SVM

A rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on Recursive Quantitative Analysis (RQA) combined with time domain feature extraction and Whale Optimization Algorithm Support Vector Machine (WOA-SVM) is proposed. Firstly, the recurrence graph of the vibration signal is drawn, and the nonlinear feature parameters in the recurrence graph combined with Standard Deviation (STD) are extracted by recursive quantitative analysis method to generate feature vectors; after that, in order to construct the optimal support vector machine model, the Whale Optimization Algorithm is used to optimize the c and g parameters. Finally, both Recursive Quantitative Analysis and standard deviation are combined with the WOA-SVM model to perform fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. The rolling bearing datasets from Case Western Reserve University and Jiangnan University were used for example analysis, and the fault identification accuracy reached 100% and 95.00%, respectively. Compared to other methods, the method proposed in this paper has higher diagnostic accuracy and wide practical applicability, and the risk of accidents can be reduced through accurate fault diagnosis, which is also important for safety and environmental policies. This research originated in the field of mechanical fault diagnosis to solve the problem of fault diagnosis of rolling bearings in industrial production, it builds on previous research and explores new methods and techniques to fill some gaps in the field of mechanical fault diagnosis.

Multi-Scale Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Transfer Learning

Confronting the challenge of identifying unknown fault types in rolling bearing fault diagnosis, this study introduces a multi-scale bearing fault diagnosis method based on transfer learning. Initially, a multi-scale feature extraction network, MBDCNet, is constructed. This network, by integrating the features of vibration signals at multiple scales, is dedicated to capturing key information within bearing vibration signals. Innovatively, this study replaces traditional convolution with dynamic convolution in MBDCNet, aiming to enhance the model’s flexibility and adaptability. Furthermore, the study implements pre-training and transfer learning strategies to maximally extract latent knowledge from source domain data. By optimizing the loss function and fine-tuning the learning rate, the robustness and generalization ability of the model in the target domain are significantly improved. The proposed method is validated on bearing datasets provided by Case Western Reserve University and Jiangnan University. The experimental results demonstrate high accuracy in most diagnostic tasks, achieving optimal average accuracy on both datasets, thus verifying the stability and robustness of our approach in various diagnostic tasks. This offers a reliable research direction in terms of enhancing the reliability of industrial equipment, especially in the field of bearing fault diagnosis.

Multi-layer convolutional dictionary learning network for signal denoising and its application to explainable rolling bearing fault diagnosis

As a vital mechanical sub-component, the health monitoring of rolling bearings is important. Vibration signal analysis is a commonly used approach for fault diagnosis of bearings. Nevertheless, the collected vibration signals cannot avoid interference from noises which has a negative influence on fault diagnosis. Thus, denoising needs to be utilized as an essential step of vibration signal processing. Traditional denoising methods need expert knowledge to select hyperparameters. And data-driven methods based on deep learning lack interpretability and a clear justification for the design of architecture in a “black-box” deep neural network. An approach to systematically design neural networks is by unrolling algorithms, such as learned iterative soft-thresholding (LISTA). In this paper, the multi-layer convolutional LISTA (ML-CLISTA) algorithm is derived by embedding a designed multi-layer sparse coder to the convolutional extension of LISTA. Then the multi-layer convolutional dictionary learning (ML-CDL) network for mechanical vibration signal denoising is proposed by unrolling ML-CLISTA. By combining ML-CDL network with a classifier, the proposed denoising method is applied to the explainable rolling bearing fault diagnosis. The experiments on two bearing datasets show the superiority of the ML-CDL network over other typical denoising methods.

A rolling bearing fault diagnosis technique based on fined-grained multi-scale symbolic entropy and whale optimization algorithm-MSVM

As a critical and fragile rotary supporting component in mechanical equipment, fault diagnosis of rolling bearing has been a hot issue. A rolling bearing fault diagnosis technique based on fined-grained multi-scale symbolic entropy and whale optimization algorithm-multiclass support vector machine (abbreviated as FGMSE-WOA-MSVM) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the vibration signals are decomposed with fine-grained multi-scale decomposition, and the symbolic entropy of the sub-signals at different analysis scales are extracted and constructed as the multi-dimension fault feature vector. In order to address the problem of sensitive parameters for MSVM model, whale optimization algorithm (abbreviated as WOA) is introduced to optimize the penalty factor and kernel function parameters to construct the optimal WOA-MSVM model. Finally, Instance analysis is carried out with bearing fault dataset from Jiangnan University to verify the parameters influence and the effectiveness on the unbalanced sample set. The results show that compared with different feature vector inputs and learning models such as k-Nearest Neighbor (abbreviated as KNN), Decision Tree (abbreviated as DT), Random Forest (RF), etc., the proposed technique can achieve an accuracy rate of 99.33%, besides, the computation speed is fast and the diagnosis efficiency is high which means its potential value for engineering application.

Transfer learning rolling bearing fault diagnosis model based on deep feature decomposition and class-level alignment

Research on transfer learning in rolling bearing fault diagnosis can help overcome challenges such as different data distributions and limited fault samples. However, most existing methods still struggle to address the zero-shot cross-domain problem within the same equipment and the few-shot cross-machine problem. In response to these challenges, this paper introduces a transfer learning rolling bearing fault diagnosis model based on deep feature decomposition and class-level alignment. The model consists of two stages. In the first stage, the original vibration signals undergo continuous wavelet transform to obtain time–frequency diagram. Subsequently, a convolutional neural network extracts features from the diagram. The obtained deep features are decomposed into four types: uncertain features, domain-shared features, domain-specific features and category features. Multiple loss functions are then employed to remove extraneous features beyond the category features. In the second stage, category features are further extracted, and convolutional block attention module is introduced to further reduce the potential interference of unexcluded irrelevant information within the category features with classification results. Simultaneously applying a class-level alignment strategy effectively alleviates inter-domain class distribution discrepancies. Experimental validation was conducted on three distinct datasets, revealing a significant improvement in the classification performance of the proposed method over alternative methods. Furthermore, the model demonstrated robustness and noise resistance.

Wavelet packet decomposition with motif patterns for rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable working loads

Bearing intelligent diagnosis based on signal processing has been a hot research topic. However, due to the different data distribution caused by the variable working loads, the model learned from source domain has poor performance in target domain. To solve this problem, a feature extraction method named Wavelet Packet Decomposition with Motif Patterns (WPDMP) is proposed. Firstly, multiscale signals are obtained using wavelet packet decomposition; then, the MP features of these multiscale signals and the original signal are extracted; finally, these MPs are combined as input vector of support vector classification (SVC) for fault identification. Compared with other methods, the proposed method has extraordinary superiority for unlabeled target domain fault diagnosis. In addition, the feature visualization results show that the proposed model can extract domain invariant features, so the proposed model has considerable research prospects.

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis based on variational mode decomposition and weighted multidimensional feature entropy fusion

Since bearing fault signal in complex running status is usually characterized as nonlinear and non-stationary, it is difficult to extract accurate affluent features and achieve effective fault identification via conventional signal processing tools. In this article, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis technique based on variational mode decomposition and weighted multidimensional feature entropy fusion is proposed to address this issue, which is mainly composed of three procedures. First, the original signal undergoes the variational model decomposition. Next, the signal features are extracted by weighted multidimensional feature entropy as the input of the diagnosis model. Finally, the classification is performed by a convolutional neural network. The method is applied in simulation and experimental analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed method, which demonstrates strong immunity to noise and robustness, can more effectively and adaptively extract the fault features of rolling bearings and achieve the goal of identifying the rolling bearing fault category and damage degree under variable operating conditions. Meanwhile, this approach exhibits superior accuracy and identification performance to some similar entropy-based hybrid approaches referred to in this article, with a promising prospect in industrial application.

Synchronous odd symmetric transform for rolling bearing fault diagnosis

Time-frequency analysis (TFA) is an important tool to process non-stationary signals and detect bearing faults. For considering energy concentration, computational efficiency, and computational accuracy, a novel TFA technique, termed synchronous odd symmetric transform (SOST) is proposed in this paper. In the SOST, the odd symmetry extraction operator (OSEO) is defined according to the odd symmetric window based short-time Fourier transform (OSTFT). The main idea of OSEO is to obtain accurate instantaneous frequency (IF) ridges in a satisfactory computation time. Meanwhile, the STFT result is retained at the IF ridges, and the time–frequency representation (TFR) with high energy concentration is calculated. The performance of the developed technique is verified by a multi-component signal with strong frequency-modulated and amplitude-modulated (FM-AM) laws. Experimental analysis results show that the proposed SOST can display bearing fault-related time–frequency trajectories with high time–frequency resolution.

Automatic fault diagnosis of rolling bearings under multiple working conditions based on unsupervised stack denoising autoencoder

In practical engineering, data often lack labels, resulting in difficulty in fault diagnosis. Because stack-denoising autoencoders possess robust feature extraction capabilities and resistance to interference, an automatic and unsupervised bearing fault diagnosis method based on the stack-denoising autoencoder without an output layer was proposed in this study. As the stacked denoising autoencoder is an unsupervised algorithm, this approach can reduce reliance on manually labeled data labels. Therefore, this study proposed a new method for automatic fault diagnosis. First, the bearing fault features of the rolling bearing were extracted using the stack denoising autoencoder without an output layer. Meanwhile, the dimensions of the features were directly reduced to two or three dimensions by several hidden layers, thereby reducing manual experience. Second, the labels extracted from the clustering model were selected as inputs for different classifier models to automatically identify different types of faults. Two open-source rolling bearing datasets under various conditions were used to validate the classification performance of the proposed method. Finally, its effectiveness was verified using the experimental results. Various indicators were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and the results showed an automatic bearing fault diagnosis accuracy of up to 90% when using different models and working conditions. Among the two datasets, the classification model achieved the highest accuracies of 0.99667 and 0.97143 and the lowest accuracies of 0.98000 and 0.90476, respectively.

A novel method of rolling bearings fault diagnosis based on singular spectrum decomposition and optimized stochastic configuration network

Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is essential for the safe operation of rotating machinery. However, in the production process, the rolling bearings have a complex working environment embedded with weak fault signals and a large number of interfering signals, which is a considerable challenge to automatically and accurately detect bearing fault type from the actual vibration signal. Therefore, a novel fault diagnosis scheme is proposed based on singular spectrum decomposition (SSD) and an optimized stochastic configuration network (SCN). Firstly, SSD is used to pre-process the original rolling bearings vibration signal to obtain several singular spectral components (SSCs) and the practical component is selected according to the maximum correlation coefficient for signal reconstruction. Furthermore, time domain and power spectrum entropy (PSE) features of the reconstructed signal are extracted to obtain a fault information-rich feature sets. In addition, the parameters of the SCN are optimized by marine predators algorithm (MPA) to enhance the learning ability and generalization performance of the SCN. Finally, the feature sets are input into MPA-SCN to achieve fault classification. Experimental results exhibit that the proposed method has higher accuracy in rolling bearings fault diagnosis compared with other methods, which provides a high-efficiency solution for rolling bearings fault diagnosis.

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis based on Gramian angular difference field and improved channel attention model.

Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is a critical task, and in previous research, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been used to process vibration signals and perform fault diagnosis. However, traditional CNN models have certain limitations in terms of accuracy. To improve accuracy, we propose a method that combines the Gramian angular difference field (GADF) with residual networks (ResNet) and embeds frequency channel attention module (Fca) in the ResNet to diagnose rolling bearing fault. Firstly, we used GADF to convert the signals into RGB three-channel fault images during data preprocessing. Secondly, to further enhance the performance of the model, on the foundation of the ResNet we embedded the frequency channel attention module with discrete cosine transform (DCT) to form Fca, to effectively explores the channel information of fault images and identifies the corresponding fault characteristics. Finally, the experiment validated that the accuracy of the new model reaches 99.3% and the accuracy reaches 98.6% even under an unbalanced data set, which significantly improves the accuracy of fault diagnosis and the generalization of the model.

Bearing fault diagnosis based on the feature enhancement of improved mean differential SDP images★ ★This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 61603149]; Shandong Province Natural Science Foundation [No. ZR2023MF102

In the fault diagnosis of mechanical equipment, vibrational signals often contain noise. In order to solve the problem of rolling bearing fault diagnosis under the influence of noise, an image enhancement method based on mean difference images is proposed. Convert one-dimensional time series into two-dimensional image data by using the symmetrized dot pattern method. The data are processed and grouped by variational mode decomposition to obtain a mean image with stable features. A feature enhancement method based on improved mean difference images is used to achieve data mining of fault features. The improved Canberra distance is used as the classification basis to realize the accurate classification of rolling bearing faults. Finally, the classification effect of the method is verified by experiments. The experimental results show that the image enhancement method proposed in this paper can improve fault features in the image and has a good anti-noise ability.

Virtual Reality Solutions for Enhanced Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings in Passenger Cableways with an Improved Deep Learning Approach

Virtual Reality Solutions for Enhanced Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings in Passenger Cableways with an Improved Deep Learning Approach