Remaining useful life prediction for space bearing with cage friction fault based on data pre-screening and gated recurrent unit

Abstract The remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings in space inertia actuators is crucial for performance maintenance requirements. But it is quite difficult to accurately predict the RUL of space bearings due to the significant intermittency and nonstationary properties caused by cage friction faults commonly occurring during the operation of the actuator. This paper proposes a data-driven method for RUL prediction of space bearings by incorporating the gated recurrent unit network with a novel data pre-screening approach. In the proposed method, a stacked autoencoder and clustering approach are introduced into the data pre-processing method, and a health index called Overrun-Distance is constructed for lifetime assessment. To verify the proposed method, a series of vibration tests on flywheels equipped with space bearings are conducted and used for RUL evaluation. The results show that the proposed RUL prediction method is applicable to space bearings for RUL prediction with high accuracy and effectiveness.