Remaining useful life prognostics of bearings based on convolution attention networks and enhanced transformer

Rolling bearings are critical components of industrial equipment, and predicting their remaining useful life (RUL) is a challenging task. This article proposes a new end-to-end model (MDSCT) to achieve efficient and accurate prediction of bearing RUL. MDSCT uses the raw vibration signals collected by sensors for prediction, without relying on a large amount of prior knowledge. The feature extraction backbone of this model is composed of an MDSC attention module that integrates multiple parallel depth-wise separable convolutions and an efficient attention mechanism, combined with a tansformer encoder (PPSformer) optimized using patch embedding and probesparse self attention techniques. They are respectively used to capture local subtle features and global dependent features in degraded signals. This article also proposes an improved adaptive activation function AdaptH_Swish to enhance the model's ability to model nonlinear relationships. To comprehensively verify the comprehensive performance of the model, this paper conducted detailed ablation and comparative experiments using two standard datasets, PHM2012 and XJTU-SY. The experimental results not only confirm the rationality and efficiency of the model structure design, but also demonstrate significant advantages in three evaluation indicators compared to various existing methods, fully demonstrating the high generalization and strong robustness of the MDSCT model in bearing RUL prediction tasks.