Intelligent Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings Based on Digital Twin and Multi-Scale CNN-AT-BiGRU Model

Rolling bearings constitute critical rotating components within rolling mill equipment. Production efficiency and the operational safety of the whole mechanical system are directly governed by their operational health state. To address the dual challenges of the over-reliance of conventional diagnostic methods on expert experience and the scarcity of fault samples in industrial scenarios, we propose a virtual–physical data fusion-optimized intelligent fault diagnosis framework. Initially, a dynamics-based digital twin model for rolling bearings is developed by leveraging their geometric symmetry. It is capable of generating comprehensive fault datasets through parametric adjustments of bearing dimensions and operational environments in virtual space. Subsequently, a symmetry-informed architecture is constructed, which integrates multi-scale convolutional neural networks with attention mechanisms and bidirectional gated recurrent units (MCNN-AT-BiGRU). This architecture enables spatiotemporal feature extraction and enhances critical fault characteristics. The experimental results demonstrate 99.5% fault identification accuracy under single operating conditions. It maintains stable performance under low SNR conditions. Furthermore, the framework exhibits superior generalization capability and transferability across the different bearing types.