A bearing fault diagnosis method based on M-SSCNN and M-LR attention mechanism

Bearing fault diagnosis is vital for mechanical maintenance and fault prediction. It ensures equipment safety, extends lifespan, reduces maintenance costs, and improves production efficiency. Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that some existing diagnostic methods have achieved high accuracy rates in certain scenarios. However, the challenge lies in their limited generalization capabilities, which can lead to reduced accuracy when applied to diverse or unseen conditions. In this study, we proposed a new bearing fault diagnosis method to address the issue of low accuracy caused by the inadequate generalization of models in the process of rolling bearing fault diagnosis. The method is based on a multi-scale sliding convolution neural network and multi-level residual attention mechanism, the model exhibits high accuracy, strong generalization capability, and lightweight structure. Firstly, the time domain signal of the bearing vibration is converted into a two-dimensional time–frequency map, and the image is pixel-segmented using superpixel segmentation techniques. Next, a multi-scale parallel convolution approach is used to extract features to improve the adaptability and robustness of the model to objects of different sizes and scales. Sliding convolution is used instead of pooling to avoid the problem of feature loss caused by maximum pooling and average pooling. A multi-level attention mechanism is then introduced for all stacked channels to focus on the more important and critical information of the module, and residual connections are added to prevent degradation of the network performance. Finally, the proposed method is passed through the fully connected layer for classification using the Softmax classifier. Experimental verification using public datasets and experimental data of our research group shows that the proposed method has better performance than the existing diagnostic methods and diagnostic models. The proposed method offers an advanced and innovative solution in the domain of bearing fault diagnosis.