A fault diagnosis method for aero-engine inter-shaft bearings based on 1DCNN-Transformer-BiGRU.

Abstract

To address the challenges of difficult fault feature extraction and feature aliasing in aero-engine inter-shaft bearings under strong noise conditions, this paper proposes a fusion diagnostic method that integrates a dual-scale one-dimensional convolutional neural network, a multi-head self-attention Transformer, and a bidirectional gated recurrent unit. The method employs a three-stage progressive network architecture for end-to-end fault diagnosis. The dual-scale 1DCNN extracts local temporal features from vibration signals, and batch normalization and dropout are applied to stabilize training and reduce potential overfitting. The Transformer encoder models dependencies among the extracted feature representations, supporting the representation of fault-sensitive features. The BiGRU captures bidirectional temporal dependencies in the fault evolution process. Experimental validation on the Harbin Institute of Technology aero-engine inter-shaft bearing dataset shows that the proposed model achieves 97% diagnostic accuracy under extreme noise conditions (SNR = -5 dB). Compared with existing methods, these results indicate that the proposed network effectively maintains diagnostic performance under controlled noise conditions.