Effective bearing fault diagnosis is vital for the safe and reliable operation of rotating machinery. In practical applications, bearings often work at various rotational speeds as well as load conditions. Yet, the bearing fault diagnosis under multiple conditions is a new subject, which needs to be further explored. Therefore, a multi-scale deep belief network (DBN) method integrated with attention mechanism is proposed for the purpose of extracting the multi-scale core features from vibration signals, containing four primary steps: preprocessing of multi-scale data, feature extraction, feature fusion, and fault classification. The key novelties include multi-scale feature extraction using multiscale DBN algorithm, and feature fusion using attention mechanism. The benchmark dataset from University of Ottawa is applied to validate the effectiveness as well as advantages of this method. Furthermore, the aforementioned method is compared with four classical fault diagnosis methods reported in the literature, and the comparison results show that our proposed method has higher diagnostic accuracy and better robustness.

Rotating machinery often works under complex and variable working conditions; the vibration signals that are widely used for the health monitoring of rotating machinery show extremely complicated dynamic frequency characteristics. It is unlikely that a few certain frequency components are used as the representative fault signatures for all working conditions. Aiming at a general solution, this paper proposes an intelligent bearing fault diagnosis method that integrates adaptive variational mode decomposition (AVMD), mode sorting based deep belief network (DBN) and extreme learning machine (ELM). It can adaptively decompose non-stationery vibration signals into temporary frequency components and sort out a set of effective frequency components for online fault diagnosis. For online implementation, a similarity matching method is proposed, which can match the online-obtained frequency-domain fault signatures with the historical fault signatures, and the parameters of AVMD-DBN-ELM model are set to be the same as the most similar case. The proposed method can decompose vibration signals into different modes adaptively and retain effective modes, and it can learn from the idea of an attention mechanism and fuse the results according to the weight of MIV. It also can improve the timeliness of the fault diagnosis. For comprehensive verification of the proposed method, the bearing dataset from the University of Ottawa is used, and some recent methods are repeated for comparative analysis. The results can prove that our proposed method has higher reliability, higher accuracy and higher efficiency.

With the advance of industrial systems, the online equipment fault diagnosis has encountered many challenges such as data drift and data imbalance under varying operating conditions, thus making stable and accurate diagnosis increasingly critical. Considering the above issues, a multi-scale attention mechanism diagnosis method with adaptive model that can be updated based on deep learning has been proposed. The method is composed of four main steps: training the multi-scale offline diagnosis model, transferring the parameters of the offline model, assessing the degree of data drifting, and adaptively updating the diagnostic model. A data balance strategy with adaptive weight balances both inter-class and intra-class data. The method updates the diagnostic model flexibly according to online data status, to reduce the impact of data drifting. The method was verified on a bearing test rig, which can reproduce the common bearing faults under variable working conditions. The experimental results have shown that the proposed method can accurately and reliably identify the bearing faults.