Rolling Bearing Remaining Useful Life Prediction Based on CNN-VAE-MBiLSTM

Ensuring precise prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL) for bearings in rolling machinery is crucial for preventing sudden machine failures and optimizing equipment maintenance strategies. Since the significant interference encountered in real industrial environments and the high complexity of the machining process, accurate and robust RUL prediction of rolling bearings is of tremendous research importance. Hence, a novel RUL prediction model called CNN-VAE-MBiLSTM is proposed in this paper by integrating advantages of convolutional neural network (CNN), variational autoencoder (VAE), and multiple bi-directional long short-term memory (MBiLSTM). The proposed approach includes a CNN-VAE model and a MBiLSTM model. The CNN-VAE model performs well for automatically extracting low-dimensional features from time–frequency spectrum of multi-axis signals, which simplifies the construction of features and minimizes the subjective bias of designers. Based on these features, the MBiLSTM model achieves a commendable performance in the prediction of RUL for bearings, which independently captures sequential characteristics of features in each axis and further obtains differences among multi-axis features. The performance of the proposed approach is validated through an industrial case, and the result indicates that it exhibits a higher accuracy and a better anti-noise capacity in RUL predictions than comparable methods.