Operation stage division and RUL prediction of bearings based on 1DCNN-ON-LSTM

Abstract Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of bearings is significantly important to ensure reliable operation of bearings. In practice, it is routinely impossible to obtain the full life cycle degradation data of bearings that needs to be used in prediction. The accuracy of the RUL prediction of bearings is often affected by incomplete degradation data. Regarding this situation, this paper proposes a multi-sensor three-stage RUL prediction framework based on the one-dimensional convolutional ordered neuron long short-term memory (1DCNN-ON-LSTM) neural network. Firstly, 1DCNN is used to extract spatial features adaptively from multi-sensor’s data and fuse them into one-dimensional feature. Next, the unsupervised hierarchy mechanism of time series information based ON-LSTM is developed to determine the ‘initial degradation stage point’ and ‘rapid degradation stage point’ of the bearing from the one-dimensional feature. Once the signal features collected by sensors input to the model reach the degradation stage point, select the corresponding sensitive features as input and construct the 1DCNN-ON-LSTM model that performs RUL prediction after the degradation stage point to improve the prediction accuracy of the model. Based on the proposed hierarchy mechanism, the bearings’ operation process is divided into three operation stages: normal stage, initial degradation stage and rapid degradation stage. Finally, the experiments verify that the proposed method can effectively divide the operation stages of bearings to predict the RUL and improve the generalization ability and prediction accuracy of the model.