A Novel Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Improved Convolutional Neural Network and Multi-Sensor Fusion

Bearings are key components of modern mechanical equipment. To address the issue that the limited information contained in the single-source signal of the bearing leads to the limited accuracy of the single-source fault diagnosis method, a multi-sensor fusion fault diagnosis method is proposed to improve the reliability of bearing fault diagnosis. Firstly, the feature extraction process of the convolutional neural network (CNN) is improved based on the theory of variational Bayesian inference, which forms the variational Bayesian inference convolutional neural network (VBICNN). VBICNN is used to obtain preliminary diagnosis results of single-channel signals. Secondly, considering the redundancy of information contained in multi-channel signals, a voting strategy is used to fuse the preliminary diagnosis results of the single-channel model to obtain the final results. Finally, the proposed method is evaluated by an experimental dataset of the axlebox bearing of a high-speed train. The results show that the average diagnosis accuracy of the proposed method can reach more than 99% and has favorable stability.