In actual production, bearings are usually in a normal working state, which results in a lack of data for fault diagnosis (FD). Yet, the majority of existing studies on FD of rolling bearings focus on scenarios with ample fault data, while research on diagnosing small-sample bearings remains scarce. Therefore, this study presents an FD method for small-sample bearings, employing variational-mode decomposition and Symmetric Dot Pattern, combined with a pre-trained and fine-tuned Residual Network18 (VSDP-TLResNet18). The approach utilizes variational-mode decomposition (VMD) to break down the signal, determining the k value and the best Intrinsic-Mode Function (IMF) component based on center frequency and kurtosis criteria. Following this, the chosen IMF component is converted into a two-dimensional image using the Symmetric Dot Pattern (SDP) transform. In order to maximize the discrimination between two-dimensional fault images, Pearson correlation analysis is carried out on the parameters of SDP to select the optimal parameters. Finally, we use the pre-trained and fine-tuned method combined with ResNet18 for small-sample FD to improve the diagnosis accuracy of the model. Relative to alternative approaches, the suggested method demonstrates strong performance when dealing with small-sample FD.

For safe maintenance and to reduce the risk of mechanical faults, the remaining useful life (RUL) estimate of bearings is significant. The typical methods of bearings’ RUL prediction suffer from low prediction accuracy because of the difficulty in extracting features. With the aim of improving the accuracy of RUL prediction, an approach based on multi-branch improved convolutional network (MBCNN) with global attention mechanism combined with bi-directional long- and short-term memory (BiLSTM) network is proposed for bearings’ RUL prediction. Firstly, the original vibration signal is fast Fourier transformed to obtain the frequency domain signal and then normalized. Secondly, the original signal and the frequency domain signal are input into the designed MBCNN network as two branches to extract the spatial features, and then input into the BiLSTM network to further extract the timing features, and the RUL of bearings is mapped by the fully connected network to achieve the purpose of prediction. Finally, an example validation was performed on a publicly available bearing degradation dataset. Compared with some existing prediction methods, the mean absolute and root mean square errors of the predictions were reduced by “22.2%” to “50.0%” and “26.1%” to “52.8%”, respectively, which proved the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

Fault data under real operating conditions are often difficult to collect, making the number of trained fault data small and out of proportion to normal data. Thus, fault diagnosis symmetry (balance) is compromised. This will result in less effective fault diagnosis methods for cases with a small number of data and data imbalances (S&I). We present an innovative solution to overcome this problem, which is composed of two components: data augmentation and fault diagnosis. In the data augmentation section, the S&I dataset is supplemented with a deep convolutional generative adversarial network based on a gradient penalty and Wasserstein distance (WDCGAN-GP), which solve the problems of the generative adversarial network (GAN) being prone to model collapse and the gradient vanishing during the training time. The addition of self-attention allows for a better identification and generation of sample features. Finally, the addition of spectral normalization can stabilize the training of the model. In the fault diagnosis section, fault diagnosis is performed through a convolutional neural network with coordinate attention (CNN-CA). Our experiments conducted on two bearing fault datasets for comparison demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses other comparative approaches in terms of the quality of data augmentation and the accuracy of fault diagnosis. It effectively addresses S&I fault diagnosis challenges.

In order to cope with the influences of noise interference and variable load on rolling bearing fault diagnosis in real industrial environments, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on CBAM_ResNet and ACON activation function is proposed. Firstly, the collected bearing working vibration signals are made into input samples to retain the original features to the maximum extent. Secondly, the CBAM_ResNet fault diagnosis model is constructed. By taking advantage of the convolutional neural network (CNN) in classification tasks and key feature extraction, the convolutional block attention module network (CBAM) is embedded in the residual blocks, to avoid model degradation and enhance the interaction of information in channel and spatial, raise the key feature extraction capability of the model. Finally, the Activate or Not (ACON) activation function, is introduced to adaptively activate shallow features for the purpose of improving the model’s feature representation and generalization capability. The bearing dataset of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is used for experiments, and the average accuracy of the proposed method is 97.68% and 93.93% under strong noise interference and variable load, respectively. Compared with the other three published bearing fault diagnosis methods, the results indicate that this proposed method has better noise immunity and generalization ability, and has good application value.

Intelligent fault diagnosis encounters the challenges of varying working conditions and sample class imbalance individually, but very few approaches address both challenges simultaneously. This article proposes an improvement network model named ICDAN-F, which can deal with fault diagnosis scenarios with class imbalance and working condition variations in an integrated way. First, Focal Loss, which was originally designed for target detection, is introduced to alleviate the sample class imbalance problem of fault diagnosis and emphasize the key features. Second, the domain discriminator is improved by the default ReLU activation function being replaced with Tanh so that useful negative value information can help extract transferable fault features. Extensive transfer experiments dealing with varying working conditions are conducted on two bearing fault datasets with the effect of class imbalance. The results show that the fault diagnosis performance of ICDAN-F outperforms several other widely used domain adaptation methods, achieving 99.76% and 96.76% fault diagnosis accuracies in Case 1 and Case 2, respectively, which predicts that ICDAN-F can handle both challenges in a cohesive manner.