Intelligent diagnosis of faults in an aero-hydraulic pipeline is important for condition monitoring of its systems. However, there are no more qualitative formulas or feature indicators to describe the faults of aero-hydraulic pipelines because of the complexity and diversity of aero-hydraulic pipeline systems, which leads to a very complex pipeline fault mechanism. In addition, although it is well known that the expression of interpretable and representable pipeline intelligent diagnosis models with pipeline fault characteristics are buried in high background noise and strong noise disturbance conditions in practical industrial scenarios, this has yet to be discussed. Inspired by the demand, this paper proposes a novel diagnosis strategy: the 1D-convolutional space-time fusion strategy for aero-engine hydraulic pipelines. Firstly, by optimizing the convolutional neural network and using it to design a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN) with a wide input scale to expand the input field of perception, thereby obtaining more comprehensive spatial information of the pipeline data, which can effectively extract richer short sequence features. Secondly, a network of bidirectional gated recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) is proposed, which integrates a short sequence of high-dimensional features for temporal information fusion, resulting in a certain degree of avoiding memory loss and gradient dispersion caused by the too-large step size. It is demonstrated that, for the noise signal and variable pressure signal, the fault identification accuracy approximated 95.9%, proving the proposed strategy’s robustness. By comparing with the other five methods, the proposed strategy has the ability to identify 10 different fault states in the aero-hydraulic pipeline with higher accuracy.

The quantitative diagnosis of rolling bearings is essential to automating maintenance decisions. Over recent years, Lempel–Ziv complexity (LZC) has been widely used for the quantitative assessment of mechanical failures as one of the most valuable indicators for detecting dynamic changes in nonlinear signals. However, LZC focuses on the binary conversion of 0–1 code, which can easily lose some effective information about the time series and cannot fully mine the fault characteristics. Additionally, the immunity of LZC to noise cannot be insured, and it is difficult to quantitatively characterize the fault signal under strong background noise. To overcome these limitations, a quantitative bearing fault diagnosis method based on the optimized Variational Modal Decomposition Lempel–Ziv complexity (VMD-LZC) was developed to fully extract the vibration characteristics and to quantitatively characterize the bearing faults under variable operating conditions. First, to compensate for the deficiency that the main parameters of the variational modal decomposition (VMD) have to be selected by human experience, a genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the parameters of the VMD and adaptively determine the optimal parameters [k, α] of the bearing fault signal. Furthermore, the IMF components that contain the maximum fault information are selected for signal reconstruction based on the Kurtosis theory. The Lempel–Ziv index of the reconstructed signal is calculated and then weighted and summed to obtain the Lempel–Ziv composite index. The experimental results show that the proposed method is of high application value for the quantitative assessment and classification of bearing faults in turbine rolling bearings under various operating conditions such as mild and severe crack faults and variable loads.

With its formidable nonlinear mapping capabilities, deep learning has been widely applied in bearing remaining useful life (RUL) prediction. Given that equipment in actual work is subject to numerous disturbances, the collected data tends to exhibit random missing values. Furthermore, due to the dynamic nature of wind turbine environments, LSTM models relying on manually set parameters exhibit certain limitations. Considering these factors can lead to issues with the accuracy of predictive models when forecasting the remaining useful life (RUL) of wind turbine bearings. In light of this issue, a novel strategy for predicting the remaining life of wind turbine bearings under data scarcity conditions is proposed. Firstly, the average similarity (AS) is introduced to reconstruct the discriminator of the Generative Adversarial Imputation Nets (GAIN), and the adversarial process between the generative module and the discriminant is strengthened. Based on this, the dung beetle algorithm (DBO) is used to optimize multiple parameters of the long-term and short-term memory network (LSTM), and the complete data after filling is used as the input data of the optimized LSTM to realize the prediction of the remaining life of the wind power bearing. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the full-life data test of bearings. The results show that, under the condition of missing data, the new strategy of AS-GAIN-LSTM is used to predict the RUL of wind turbine bearings, which has a more stable prediction performance.

Bearing is the critical basic component of rotating machinery and its remaining life prediction is very important for mechanical equipment’s smooth and healthy operation. However, fast and accurate bearing life prediction has always been a difficult point in industry and academia. This paper proposes a new strategy for bearing health assessment based on a model-driven dynamic interval prediction model. Firstly, the mapping proportion algorithm is used to determine whether the measured data are in the degradation stage. After finding the starting point of prediction, the improved annealing algorithm is used to determine the shortest data interval that can be used for accurate prediction. Then, based on the bearing degradation curve and the information fusion inverse health index, the health index is obtained from 36 general indexes in the time domain and frequency domain through screening, fusion, and inversion. Finally, the state space equation is constructed based on the Paris-DSSM formula and the particle filter is used to iterate the state space equation parameters with the minimum interval data to construct the life prediction model. The proposed method is verified by XJTU-SY rolling bearing life data. The results show that the prediction accuracy of the proposed strategy for the remaining life of the bearing can reach more than 90%. It is verified that the improved simulated annealing algorithm selects limited interval data, reconstructs health indicators based on bearing degradation curve and information fusion, and updates the Paris-DSSM state space equation through the particle filter algorithm. The bearing life prediction model constructed on this basis is accurate and effective.

The squeeze film damper (SFD) is proven to be highly effective in mitigating rotor vibration as it traverses the critical speed, thus making it extensively utilized in the aeroengine domain. In this paper, we investigate the stiffness and damping of SFD using the Reynolds equation and neural network models. Our specific focus includes examining the structural and operating parameters of SFDs, such as clearance, feed pressure of oil, rotor whirl, and rotational speed. Firstly, the pressure distribution analytical model of the oil film inside the SFD based on the hydrodynamic lubrication theory is established, as described by the Reynolds equation. It obtained oil film forces, pressure, stiffness, and damping values under various sets of structural, lubrication, and operating parameters, including length, clearance, boundary pressure at both sides, rotational speed, and whirling motion, by applying difference computations to the Reynolds equation. Secondly, according to the significant analyses of the obtained oil film stiffness and damping, the following three parameters of the most significance are found: clearance, rotational speed, and rotor whirl. Furthermore, neural network models, including GA-BP and decision tree models, are established based on the obtained results of difference computation. The numerical simulation and calculation of these models are then applied to show their validity with all given parameters and the three significant parameters separately as two sets of model input. Regardless of either set of model inputs, these established neural network models are capable of predicting the nonlinear stiffness and damping of the oil film inside an SFD. These sensitive parameters merely require measurement, followed by the utilization of a neural network to predict stiffness and damping instead of the Reynolds equation. This process serves structural enhancement, facilitates parameter optimization in SFDs, and provides crucial support for refining the design parameters of SFDs.

The inter-shaft bearing is the core component of a high-pressure rotor support system of a high-thrust aero engine. One of the most challenging tasks for a PHM is monitoring its working condition. However, considering that in the bearing rotor system of a high-thrust aero engine bearings are prone to wear failure due to unbalanced or misaligned faults of the rotor system, especially in harsh environments, such as those at high operating loads and high rotation speeds, bearing wear can easily evolve into serious faults. Compared with aero engine fault diagnosis and RUL prediction, relatively little research has been conducted on bearing condition monitoring. In addition, considering how to evaluate future performance states with limited time series data is a key problem. At the same time, the current deep neural network model has the technical challenge of poor interpretability. In order to fill the above gaps, we developed a new framework of a residual space–time feature fusion focusing module named RTCA-Net, which focuses on solving the key problem. It is difficult to accurately monitor the wear state of aero engine inter-shaft bearings under special working conditions in practical engineering. Specifically, firstly, a residual space–time structure module was innovatively designed to capture the characteristic information of the metal dust signal effectively. Secondly, a feature-focusing module was designed. By adjusting the change in the weight coefficient during training, the RTCA-Net framework can select the more useful information for monitoring the wear condition of inter-shaft bearings. Finally, the experimental dataset of metal debris was verified and compared with seven other methods, such as the RTC-Net. The results showed that the proposed RTCA-Net framework has good generalization, superiority, and credibility.