Multi-scale attention mechanism residual neural network for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis is crucial to improve industrial safety and reliability. In recent years, intelligent fault diagnosis method represented by deep learning (DL) has been receiving increasing attention. In order to ameliorate the full training of the deep network, improve the model accuracy, and perfect the analysis of mechanical vibration signals with huge amount of information, a multi-scale attention mechanism residual network (MSA-ResNet) fault diagnosis method is proposed in this paper. First, an attention mechanism block is introduced to construct a new type of residual block combination. Second, a multi-scale structure is constructed by choosing an appropriate convolution kernel size. Finally, the overall framework of MSA-ResNet is constructed for efficient training and failure pattern recognition. The MSA-ResNet algorithm introduces an attention mechanism in each residual module of the residual network (ResNet), which improves the sensitivity to features. The features of different scales are obtained through the multi-scale convolution kernel, and the multi-scale feature extraction of complex nonlinear mechanical vibration signals is realized. The processing of original vibration signal rarely involves artificial interference, which is more conducive to industrial application of the proposed method. Diagnostic experiments are conducted on bearing datasets from the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and the Machinery Failure Prevention Technology (MFPT) to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results illustrating the rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on MSA-ResNet have advantages in multi-scale feature extraction, noise immunity, and fault classification accuracy.