New Health Indicator Construction and Fault Detection Network for Rolling Bearings via Convolutional Auto-Encoder and Contrast Learning

As one of the most important components in rotating machinery, if bearings fail, serious disasters may occur. Therefore, the remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of bearings is of great significance. Health indicator (HI) construction and early fault detection play a crucial role in data-driven RUL prediction. Unfortunately, most existing HI construction methods require prior knowledge and preset trends, making it difficult to reflect the actual degradation trend of bearings. And the existing early fault detection methods rely on massive historical data, yet manual annotation is time-consuming and laborious. To address the above issues, a novel deep convolutional auto-encoder (CAE) based on envelope spectral feature extraction is developed in this work. A sliding value window is defined in the envelope spectrum to obtain initial health indicators, which are used as preliminary labels for model training. Subsequently, CAE is trained by minimizing the composite loss function. The proposed construction method can reflect the actual degradation trend of bearings. Afterwards, the autoencoder is pre-trained through contrast learning (CL) to improve its discriminative ability. The model that has undergone offline pre-training is more sensitive to early faults. Finally, the HI construction method is combined with the early fault detection method to obtain a comprehensive network for online health assessment and fault detection, thus laying a solid foundation for subsequent RUL prediction. The superiority of the proposed method has been verified through experiments.