Fault diagnosis of rolling bearing based on deep convolutional neural network and gated recurrent unit

Rolling bearing is an essential part of various rotating machines, and its signal is the typical nonlinear signal. Traditional fault diagnosis usually relies on manual experience to extract the features of signals first. Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) can make fuller use of time series than traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN). Because of the low accuracy rate, fault diagnosis using gated recurrent unit (GRU) alone is not unsatisfactory. In order to improve the temporality of one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-CNN) and enhance the accuracy of GRU, a novel fault diagnosis method called deep convolutional neural networks gated recurrent unit (DCNN-GRU) is first put forward, which combines DCNN with GRU. The original signals without preprocessing are input into the DCNN, and the outputs of DCNN are input into the GRU consequently. Then the faults of rolling bearing can be diagnosed effectively. As the post-processing method, the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) method is applied to visualize the fault diagnosis results. Six different network models, including the DCNN-GRU, are used to train the same fault dataset for comparison. The simulation results show that the proposed method can reach more than 99.9% accuracy stably for the given dataset, which can verify the feasibility and effectiveness of proposed method. And the DCNN-GRU can also be verified with good generalization ability using different dataset.