Remaining Useful Life of the Rolling Bearings Prediction Method Based on Transfer Learning Integrated with CNN-GRU-MHA

To accurately predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of rolling bearings under limited data and fluctuating load conditions, we propose a new method for constructing health indicators (HI) and a transfer learning prediction framework, which integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), and Multi-head attention (MHA). Firstly, we combined Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to fully extract temporal and spatial features from vibration signals. Then, the Multi-head attention mechanism (MHA) was added for weighted processing to improve the expression ability of the model. Finally, a new method for constructing Health indicators (HIs) was proposed in which the noise reduction and normalized vibration signals were taken as a HI, the L1 regularization method was added to avoid overfitting, and the model-based transfer learning method was used to realize the RUL prediction of bearings under small samples and variable load conditions. Experiments were conducted using the PHM2012 dataset from the FEMTO-ST research institute and XJTU-SY dataset. Three sets of 12 migration experiments were conducted under three different operating conditions on the PHM2012 dataset. The results show that the average RMSE of the proposed method was 0.0443, indicating high prediction accuracy under variable loads and small sample conditions. Three different operating conditions and two sets of four migration experiments were conducted on the XJTU-SY dataset, and the results show that the average RMSE of the proposed method was 0.0693, verifying the good generalization of the model under variable load conditions. In summary, the proposed HI construction method and prediction framework can effectively reduce the differences between features, with high stability and good generalizability.