A Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Dilated Convolution and Multi-Head Self-Attention Mechanism

Abstract

Rolling bearings serve as the fundamental components of rotating machinery. Failure to detect damage early in these components can result in equipment shutdown, leading not only to economic losses but also to a threat to worker safety. Given the diverse range of rotating parts, it is crucial to promptly identify and accurately diagnose early bearing failures during the maintenance of large-scale machinery. To achieve quick and precise fault diagnosis, this study proposes a method based on dilated convolution, a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU), and a multi-head self-attention mechanism. The key advantage lies in its ability to directly process raw 1D sampled data without requiring complex time–frequency domain conversion. To validate the model’s accuracy and stability, we conducted empirical studies using both the HUST bearing dataset proposed by Thuan, Nguyen et al. and the CWRU bearing dataset from Western Reserve University. The results demonstrate that our model achieves an impressive accuracy rate of 99.94%, along with an f1 value for the test set when dealing with multiple operating conditions for all five types of bearings in the HUST dataset. Moreover, when applied to the CWRU dataset, these two metrics even reached 99.95%. Furthermore, the proposed model achieves a significant prediction accuracy of more than 98.5% on two datasets containing different types of noise and different levels of white Gaussian noise, highlighting its great potential in practical applications of early bearing fault diagnosis.

Keywords

• rolling bearing
• fault diagnosis
• dilated convolution
• Bidirectional Gated Neural Unit
• self-attention mechanism