It is significant for the evaluation and prediction of the performance degradation of rolling bearings. However, the degradation stage division of the rolling bearing performance is not obvious in traditional methods, and the prediction accuracy is low. Therefore, an Attention‐LSTM method is proposed to improve the evaluation and prediction of the performance degradation of rolling bearings. First, to reduce the uncertainty of the manual intervention, performance degradation characteristic indexes of rolling bearings are evaluated and screened by the correlation, the monotonicity, and the robustness. Second, the original characteristic indicator curve is divided into the Health Indicator (HI) curve and the residual curve by means of fixed‐window averaging to quantitatively and intuitively reflect the deterioration degree of the rolling bearing performance. Finally, the Attention mechanism is combined with the LSTM model, and a scoring function is established to enhance the prediction accuracy. The scoring function is used to adjust the intermediate output state weight of the LSTM model and improve the prediction accuracy. The appropriate network structure and the parameter configuration are determined, and the prediction model of rolling bearing degradation performance is established. Compared with other models, the method proposed by this paper makes full use of the historical data and is more sensitive to the key information in the long time series, and the e_RMSE index and the e_MAE index of the two sets of experimental data are minimum, and the prediction accuracy of rolling bearing degradation performance is higher. The model has the strong robustness and the generalization ability, which has the important engineering practical value for the prediction of the equipment health state.

In engineering practice, the bearing fault signal is composed of a series of complex multi-component signals containing multiple fault characteristics information. In the early stage of fault sprouting and evolution, the fault features are easily disturbed by noise and irrelevant signals, eliminating the fault signals in the strong background noise. To overcome the influence of noise on the signal, this study proposes multi-frequency weak signal decomposition and reconstruction of rolling bearing based on adaptive cascaded stochastic resonance. First, the original signal is passed through the Hilbert transform to obtain the envelope signal. The envelope signal is high-pass filtered to eliminate the interference of low-frequency components on the response of the stochastic resonance system. Secondly, cascaded stochastic resonance system parameters are adaptively optimized by the quantum particle swarm algorithm (QPSO). The high-pass filtered signal input to the adaptive cascaded stochastic resonance system (ACSRS) can further enhance the weak fault characteristics, allowing the gradual transfer of high-frequency noise energy to the low-frequency fault characteristic components. Finally, the signal is decomposed using the variational mode decomposition (VMD) method to jointly determine the location of the fault characteristic frequencies in the intrinsic mode functions (IMF) component by the energy loss coefficient and correlation coefficient to achieve the reconstruction of multi-frequency weak signals. Through simulation and experimental validation, the effectiveness and superiority of the method for multi-frequency weak signal detection in bearings are verified. The results show that the method not only achieves the adaptive optimization of the stochastic resonance system parameters gradually removing the high-frequency noise in the signal and improving the energy of the low-frequency signal but also reduces the number of decomposition layers of the VMD, enhances the fault characteristic information in the weak signal, and effectively identifies the early weak fault characteristics of rolling bearings.

Rolling bearing health status monitoring is essential for identifying early failures and avoiding un-planned downtime in industrial systems. To overcome the problems of existing entropy methods with multiple faults that are easily confounded at different scales, a weak signal feature extraction method based on refined composite multi-scale weighted entropy is proposed in this paper. The time–frequency domain features are constituted into a multi-dimensional original fault feature set, and the feature sensitivity is evaluated in terms of four feature evaluation criteria, in order to filter out a sensitive feature subset. Three types of refined composite multi-scale entropy are combined with sensitive feature parameters, in a weighted manner, through the use of the Hadamard product operation. The effects of different combinations of feature parameters on the refined composite multi-scale entropy are analyzed through experimental validation. According to the analysis of the experimental data from two test stations, the fault recognition rate reached 100% and 92.22%, respectively, based on the RCMWE method, starting from the first features. The results indicate that the proposed method can identify bearing fault types under different damage states at any scale, with the fault recognition rate being more stable than that of other methods. The proposed method can effectively distinguish rolling bearing health and fault states, providing higher classification accuracy for rolling bearing fault types and fault damage degrees. This puts forward a new idea for rolling bearing health state assessment, which has high engineering application value.