Bearing fault diagnosis based on CNN-BiLSTM and residual module

Abstract Bearings are key components of rotating machinery, and their fault diagnosis is essential for machinery operation. Bearing vibration signals belong to time series data, but traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or recurrent neural networks cannot fully extract the fault features from these signals. To address the insufficient feature extraction and poor noise resistance, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis model based on continuous wavelet transform (CWT), CNN with channel attention, bidirectional long short-term memory network (BiLSTM) and residual module. Firstly, a parallel dual-path feature extraction mechanism is constructed which takes time-domain signals and time–frequency images transformed via CWT as the input respectively. Then BiLSTM extracts the time features of the signal as one path, and the CNN with efficient channel attention extracts the spatial features as the other path. This parallel neural network contributes to better feature extraction. Then, the residual module is applied to extract the global features to further improve the feature extraction ability and noise immunity. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model on the Case Western Reserve University dataset has better diagnostic accuracy under different working conditions and different signal-to-noise ratios than other methods. In addition, the model shows good generalization performance on Jiangnan University dataset.