CNN Hardware Accelerator for Real-Time Bearing Fault Diagnosis

This paper introduces a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) hardware accelerator. It is crafted to conduct real-time assessments of bearing conditions using economical hardware components, implemented on a field-programmable gate array evaluation platform, negating the necessity to transfer data to a cloud-based server. The adoption of the down-sampling technique augments the visible time span of the signal in an image, thereby enhancing the accuracy of the bearing condition diagnosis. Furthermore, the proposed method of quaternary quantization enhances precision and shrinks the memory demand for the neural network model by an impressive 89%. Provided that the current signal data sampling rate stands at 64 K samples/s, the proposed design can accomplish real-time fault diagnosis at a clock frequency of 100 MHz. Impressively, the response duration of the proposed CNN hardware system is a mere 0.28 s, with the fault diagnosis precision reaching a remarkable 96.37%.