Fault Diagnosis Method for Rolling Bearings Based on Two-Channel CNN under Unbalanced Datasets

As a critical component in industrial systems, timely and accurate fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is closely related to reliability and safety. Since the equipment usually operates in normal conditions with few fault samples, unbalanced data distribution problems lead to poor fault diagnosis ability. To address the above problems, a two-channel convolutional neural network (TC-CNN) model is proposed. Firstly, the frequency spectrum of the vibration signal is extracted using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and the frequency spectrum is used as the input to the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN). Secondly, the time-frequency image of the vibration signal is extracted using generalized S-transform (GST), and the time-frequency image is used as the input to the two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2D-CNN). Then, feature extraction in the convolution and pooling layers is performed in the above two CNN channels, respectively. The feature vectors obtained from the two CNN models are stitched together in the fusion layer, and the fault classes are identified using an SVM classifier. Finally, using the rolling bearing experimental dataset of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), the fault diagnosis effect of the proposed TC-CNN model under various data imbalance conditions is verified. In comparison with other related works, the experimental results demonstrate the better fault diagnosis results and robustness of the method.