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The engineering challenge of rolling bearing condition monitoring has led to a large number of method developments over the past few years. Most commonly, vibration measurement data are used for fault diagnosis using machine learning algorithms. In current research, purely data-driven deep learning methods are becoming increasingly popular, aiming for accurate predictions of bearing faults without requiring bearing-specific domain knowledge. Opposing this trend in popularity, the present paper takes a more traditional approach, incorporating domain knowledge by evaluating a variety of feature engineering methods in combination with a random forest classifier. For a comprehensive feature engineering study, a total of 42 mathematical feature formulas are combined with the preprocessing methods of envelope analysis, empirical mode decomposition, wavelet transforms, and frequency band separations. While each single processing method and feature formula is known from the literature, the presented paper contributes to the body of knowledge by investigating novel series connections of processing methods and feature formulas. Using the CWRU bearing fault data for performance evaluation, feature calculation based on the processing method of frequency band separation leads to particularly high prediction accuracies, while at the same time being very efficient in terms of low computational effort. Additionally, in comparison with deep learning approaches, the proposed feature engineering method provides excellent accuracies and enables explainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In aerospace, marine, and other heavy industries, bearing fault diagnosis has been an essential part of improving machine life, reducing economic losses, and avoiding safety problems caused by machine bearing failures. Most existing bearing fault diagnosis methods face challenges in extracting the fault features from raw bearing fault data. Compared with traditional methods for bearing fault characteristics extraction, deep neural networks can automatically extract intrinsic features without expert knowledge. The convolutional neural network (CNN) was utilized most widely in extracting representative features of bearing faults. Fundamental to this, the hybrid models based on the CNN and individual classifiers were proposed to diagnose bearing faults. However, CNN may not be suitable for all bearing fault classifiers. It is crucial to identify the classifiers which can maximize the CNN feature extraction ability. In this paper, four hybrid models based on CNN were built, and their fault detection accuracy and efficiency were compared. The comparative analysis showed that the random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM) could make full use of the CNN feature extraction ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vibration signals for offshore wind-turbine high-speed bearings are often contaminated with noises due to complex environmental and structural loads, which increase the difficulty of fault detection and diagnosis. In view of this problem, we propose a fault-diagnosis strategy with good noise immunity in this paper by integrating the two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2DCNN) with random forest (RF), which is supposed to utilize both CNN's automatic feature-extraction capability and the robust discrimination performance of RF classifiers. More specifically, the raw 1D time-domain bearing-vibration signals are transformed into 2D grayscale images at first, which are then fed to the 2DCNN-RF model for fault diagnosis. At the same time, three procedures, including exponential linear unit (ELU), batch normalization (BN), and dropout, are introduced in the model to improve feature-extraction performance and the noise immune capability. In addition, when the 2DCNN feature extractor is trained, the obtained feature vectors are passed to the RF classifier to improve the classification accuracy and generalization ability of the model. The experimental results show that the diagnostic accuracy of the 2DCNN-RF model could achieve 99.548% on the CWRU high-speed bearing dataset, which outperforms the standard CNN and other standard machine-learning and deep-learning algorithms. Furthermore, when the vibration signals are polluted with noises, the 2DCNN-RF model, without retraining the model or any denoising process, still achieves satisfying performance with higher accuracy than the other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]