IMU-Based Time-Domain Fault Diagnosis of BLDC Motors Using an End-to-End 1D-CNN

Reliable fault detection in brushless DC motors is challenging owing to environmental complexity and high equipment costs. To address these challenges, we propose an effective and cost-effective approach using an optimized end-to-end one-dimensional convolutional neural network. Specifically, a real experimental platform simulating bearing and eccentricity faults was developed. Statistical t-tests indicated that three-axis accelerometer signals from a low-cost inertial measurement unit provided sufficient fault information for the present diagnosis task. Unlike traditional methods such as support vector machines, multilayer neural networks, and random forests, which rely on manual feature extraction, our model learns directly from raw waveforms and can handle signal drift. Under the present controlled experimental setting and the leave-one-day-out evaluation protocol, the model achieved 100.00% average window-level classification accuracy, considerably outperforming traditional methods, the performances of which declined to 67.95–71.37% under environmental shifts. Moreover, with an inference time of only 0.96 ms, 32 times faster than that of random forests, this approach is well suited for real-time embedded monitoring. The proposed method demonstrates strong potential for cost-efficient and robust fault diagnosis under the present experimental setting.