Multi-Sensor Vibration Signal Based Three-Stage Fault Prediction for Rotating Mechanical Equipment

In order to reduce maintenance costs and avoid safety accidents, it is of great significance to carry out fault prediction to reasonably arrange maintenance plans for rotating mechanical equipment. At present, the relevant research mainly focuses on fault diagnosis and remaining useful life (RUL) predictions, which cannot provide information on the specific health condition and fault types of rotating mechanical equipment in advance. In this paper, a novel three-stage fault prediction method is presented to realize the identification of the degradation period and the type of failure simultaneously. Firstly, based on the vibration signals from multiple sensors, a convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) network are combined to extract the spatiotemporal features of the degradation period and fault type by means of the cross-entropy loss function. Then, to predict the degradation trend and the type of failure, the attention-bidirectional (Bi)-LSTM network is used as the regression model to predict the future trend of features. Furthermore, the predicted features are given to the support vector classification (SVC) model to identify the specific degradation period and fault type, which can eventually realize a comprehensive fault prediction. Finally, the NSF I/UCR Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) dataset is used to verify the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed fault prediction method.