Fault Diagnosis Method for Rolling Bearings Based on a Digital Twin and WSET-CNN Feature Extraction with IPOA-LSSVM

Rolling bearings, as essential parts of rotating machinery, face significant challenges in fault diagnosis due to limited fault samples and high noise interference, both of which reduce the effectiveness of traditional methods. To tackle this, this study proposes a fault diagnosis approach that combines Digital Twin (DT) and deep learning. First, actual bearing vibration data were collected using an experimental platform. After denoising the data, a high-fidelity digital twin system was built by integrating the bearing dynamics model with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), thereby effectively increasing the fault data. Next, the Wavelet Synchro-Extracting Transform (WSET) is used for high-resolution time-frequency analysis, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are employed to extract deep fault features adaptively. The fully connected layer of the CNN is then combined with a Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM), with key parameters optimized through an Improved Pelican Optimization Algorithm (IPOA) to improve classification accuracy significantly. Experimental results based on both simulated and publicly available datasets show that the proposed model has excellent generalizability and operational flexibility, surpassing existing deep learning-based diagnostic methods in complex industrial settings.