A Novel Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Method of Rolling Bearings Based on the ConvNeXt Network with Improved DenseBlock

Rolling bearings are critical rotating components in machinery and equipment; they are essential for the normal operation of such systems. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a highly efficient, applicable, and reliable method for bearing fault diagnosis. Currently, one-dimensional data-driven fault diagnosis methods, which rely on one-dimensional data, represent a mainstream approach in this field. However, these methods exhibit weak diagnostic capabilities in noisy environments and when confronted with insufficient sample sizes. In order to solve these limitations, a new fault diagnosis method for rolling bearings is proposed, which combines the ConvNeXt network and improved DenseBlock into a parallel network with a feature fusion function. The network can fully extract the global feature and the detail feature of the signal and integrate them, which shows a good diagnostic ability in the face of a strong noise environment. Additionally, the Dy-ReLU function is introduced into the network, which enhances the generalization ability of the network and improves the convergence speed. Comparative experiments show that this method still has strong fault diagnosis capability under the condition of noise pollution and insufficient training samples.