Deep Learning Based Approach for Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Bearing is one of the most critical components in most electrical and power drives. Effective bearing fault diagnosis is important for keeping the electrical and power drives safe and operating normally. In the age of Internet of Things and Industrial 4.0, massive real-time data are collected from bearing health monitoring systems. Mechanical big data have the characteristics of large volume, diversity, and high velocity. There are two major problems in using the existing methods for bearing fault diagnosis with big data. The features are manually extracted relying on much prior knowledge about signal processing techniques and diagnostic expertise, and the used models have shallow architectures, limiting their capability in fault diagnosis. Effectively mining features from big data and accurately identifying the bearing health conditions with new advanced methods have become new issues. This paper presents a deep learning-based approach for bearing fault diagnosis. The presented approach preprocesses sensor signals using short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Based on a simple spectrum matrix obtained by STFT, an optimized deep learning structure, large memory storage retrieval (LAMSTAR) neural network, is built to diagnose the bearing faults. Acoustic emission signals acquired from a bearing test rig are used to validate the presented method. The validation results show the accurate classification performance on various bearing faults under different working conditions. The performance of the presented method is also compared with other effective bearing fault diagnosis methods reported in the literature. The comparison results have shown that the presented method gives much better diagnostic performance, even at relatively low rotating speeds.