An improved CS - Transformer for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery bearings under strong noise conditions

Abstract To address the issues of poor noise resistance and the lack of mechanistic analysis in the classification and diagnosis of fault vibration signals collected by sensors using existing deep learning models, this paper proposes a Transformer-based fault diagnosis model incorporating squared convolution under strong noise conditions, namely CS-Transformer. This model enhances the local feature representation of fault vibration signals through wide convolution kernels and squaring operations, improves the robustness of global features by leveraging global average pooling, and employs a single-layer Transformer encoder to uncover the correlations among global features, thereby further focusing on key fault features. Fault diagnosis experiments were conducted based on the CWRU and Paderborn bearing datasets. When the signal-to-noise ratio is -6 dB, the noise resistance of the model exceeds 91%, significantly outperforming other comparable models. This validates the superior classification performance and generalization ability of this model for bearing faults of varying degrees under strong noise conditions. Moreover, the analysis of the visualized envelope spectrum further confirms that this model can effectively enhance the target fault frequency and suppress the noise.