Explainable AI for Bearing Fault Prognosis Using Deep Learning Techniques

Predicting bearing failures is a vital component of machine health monitoring since bearings are essential parts of rotary machines, particularly large motor machines. In addition, determining the degree of bearing degeneration will aid firms in scheduling maintenance. Maintenance engineers may be gradually supplanted by an automated detection technique in identifying motor issues as improvements in the extraction of useful information from vibration signals are made. State-of-the-art deep learning approaches, in particular, have made a considerable contribution to automatic defect identification. Under variable shaft speed, this research presents a novel approach for identifying bearing defects and their amount of degradation. In the proposed approach, vibration signals are represented by spectrograms, and deep learning methods are applied via pre-processing with the short-time Fourier transform (STFT). A convolutional neural network (CNN), VGG16, is then used to extract features and classify health status. After this, RUL prediction is carried out with the use of regression. Explainable AI using LIME was used to identify the part of the image used by the CNN algorithm to give the output. Our proposed method was able to achieve very high accuracy and robustness for bearing faults, according to numerous experiments.