Bearing fault diagnosis method based on recurrence plot and improved EfficientNetV2-S

The non-linear and non-stationary characteristics of vibration signals in rolling bearings make it difficult to accurately extract fault features. In addition, traditional fault diagnosis methods cannot fully explore the correlation characteristics between time-series of fault signals. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper introduces a recurrence plot (RP) coding technique into the field of fault diagnosis and proposes a bearing fault diagnosis method based on RP and the improved EfficientNetV2-S. Firstly, the method uses the RP coding technique to convert one-dimensional vibration signals into two-dimensional time-frequency images as inputs to the neural network. Then, the number of layers in the EfficientNetV2-S network is optimised by a non-linear attenuation strategy to reduce network parameters and improve the recognition speed. Finally, the attention mechanism is modified and the variable load dataset is constructed for training to improve the feature extraction ability and generalisation performance of the model. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are conducted based on the bearing datasets provided by Case Western Reserve University (CWRU). The experimental results show that the bearing fault diagnosis method based on RP and the improved EfficientNetV2-S cannot only realise accurate identification of bearing faults but also accurately identify the degree of bearing fault with an accuracy of 99.85%.