A bearing RUL prediction approach of vibration fault signal denoise modeling with Gate-CNN and Conv-Transformer encoder

Abstract The operating conditions of rolling bearings are complex and variable, and their vibration monitoring signals are filled with strong noise interference, resulting in a low accuracy in remaining useful life (RUL) prediction. For this issue, this paper proposes a denoising method with vibration fault signals modeling, and a novel RUL prediction method with Gate-convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Conv-Transformer encoder. Firstly, the theoretical fault signal is obtained through the vibration fault signal model, and the quality of the extracted features is improved by the wavelet threshold denoising algorithm in the process of feature extraction and selection. Moreover, the CNN is combined with the gating mechanism to construct a feature extractor with the feature evaluation function, and the convolution layers are introduced into the transformer to expand the encoder’s ability to explore local information in temporal data. By using fixed-time step temporal features as the input to the prediction module and minimizing the Huber function as the optimization objective, the relationship between temporal features and RUL is obtained. The comparison with the existing state-of-the-art RUL methods illustrates that the combination of gate control and convolutional structure proposed in this paper can not only reduce the prediction error of the model but also improve its generalization ability and robustness.