Health indicator construction by quadratic function-based deep convolutional auto-encoder and its application into bearing RUL prediction.

As one of the most important components of machinery, once the bearing has a failure, serious catastrophe may happen. Hence, for avoiding the catastrophe, it is valuable to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of bearing. Health indicators (HIs) construction plays a greatly important role in the data-driven RUL prediction. Unfortunately, most of the existing HIs construction methods need prior knowledge and few of them construct HIs from raw vibration signals. For dealing with the above issues, a novel quadratic function-based deep convolutional auto-encoder is developed in this work. The raw bearing vibration signals are first preprocessed by low-pass filtering. Then the cleaned vibration signals are input into the quadratic function-based DCAE neural networks for constructing HIs of bearings. Compared with AE, DNN, KPCA, ISOMAP, PCA and VAE, it is revealed that the proposed methodology can construct a better HI from the raw bearing vibration signal in terms of comprehensive performance. Several comparative experiments have been implemented, and the results indicate that the HI constructed by quadratic function-based DCAE neural network has stronger predictive power than the traditional data-driven HIs.