A Sound and Vibration Fusion Method for Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings under Speed-Varying Conditions

The fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is critical for the reliability assurance of mechanical systems. The operating speeds of the rolling bearings in industrial applications are usually time-varying, and the monitoring data available are difficult to cover all the speeds. Though deep learning techniques have been well developed, the generalization capacity under different working speeds is still challenging. In this paper, a sound and vibration fusion method, named the fusion multiscale convolutional neural network (F-MSCNN), was developed with strong adaptation performance under speed-varying conditions. The F-MSCNN works directly on raw sound and vibration signals. A fusion layer and a multiscale convolutional layer were added at the beginning of the model. With comprehensive information, such as the input, multiscale features are learned for subsequent classification. An experiment on the rolling bearing test bed was carried out, and six datasets under various working speeds were constructed. The results show that the proposed F-MSCNN can achieve high accuracy with stable performance when the speeds of the testing set are the same as or different from the training set. A comparison with other methods on the same datasets also proves the superiority of F-MSCNN in speed generalization. The diagnosis accuracy improves by sound and vibration fusion and multiscale feature learning.