Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

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Applied Acoustics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apacoust

Intelligent fault diagnosis of rolling bearing using variational mode

extraction and improved one-dimensional convolutional neural network
Maoyou Ye a, Xiaoan Yan a,⇑, Ning Chen a, Minping Jia b
a
School of Mechatronics Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China
b
School of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: When the rolling bearing fails, the fault features contained in bearing vibration signal are easily sub-
Received 10 July 2022 merged by fortissimo noise interference signals, and have obvious non-stationary and nonlinear proper-
Received in revised form 24 October 2022 ties. This means that it is extremely challenging to acquire useful bearing fault features and identify
Accepted 20 November 2022
bearing fault patterns effectively by traditional diagnosis methods. To more efficiently learn bearing fault
Available online 5 December 2022
information and improve bearing fault diagnosis accuracy, this research proposes a new intelligent fault
diagnosis method for rolling bearing based on variational mode extraction (VME) and an improved one-
Keywords:
dimensional convolutional neural network (I-1DCNN). Firstly, a new adaptive signal processing method
Variational mode extraction
Improved one-dimensional convolutional
named VME is employed to handle the collected bearing vibration signals with the aim of obtaining the
neural network desired mode component and removing the noise interference information. Meanwhile, the extracted
Rolling bearing mode components are randomly divided into the training set, validation set and test set. Then,
Fault diagnosis the training set and validation set are input into the proposed I-1DCNN model for training, where the
proposed I-1DCNN model may not only learn the discriminant features intelligently, but also boost the
computational efficiency and alleviate the problem of over-fitting by incorporating the early stopping
method and self-attention mechanism into the traditional one-dimensional convolutional neural net-
work (1DCNN). Finally, the test set is input into the well-trained I-1DCNN to realize the automatic iden-
tification of different fault types of rolling bearing. The effectiveness of the suggested method is
illustrated by analyzing two experimental data sets. In addition, by comparing with other representative
methods, the superiority of the proposed method is testified in bearing health condition identification.
Ó 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction In practical application, because rolling bearings work in a com-

Rolling bearing is one of the vital parts of large automatic
mechanical equipment. Since rolling bearings work in the ill-
being environment of heavy load, high pressure and high-speed
rotation for an immense amount of time, it is easy to appear differ-
ent defects (such as wear, corrosion and fracture). This may cause
mechanical equipment to be unable to operate, and even cause
serious safety accidents [1,2]. According to statistical data analysis,
the failure rate of mechanical equipment caused by bearing faults
is about 41 %. Therefore, to assure the safe work of automatic
mechanical systems and lessen the cost of manual maintenance,
it is of great significance to achieve a more accurate diagnosis of
rolling bearings [3,4].
⇑ Corresponding author at: School of Mechatronics Engineering, Nanjing Forestry
University, Nanjing 210037, China.
E-mail address: yanxiaoan89@sina.com (X. Yan).
plex environment, bearing vibration signals collected have puis-
sant non-stationary and nonlinear properties and are easy to
contain interference signals. Hence, it is imperative to preprocess
the collected vibration signals. The main purpose of preprocessing
is to separate the interference signal from the actual bearing vibra-
tion signal so that the extracted vibration signal does not contain
noise signal as far as possible. Common signal preprocessing meth-
ods include variational mode decomposition (VMD) [5,6], local
mean decomposition (LMD) [7], wavelet threshold denoising
(WTD) [8] and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) [9]. Liu
et al. [10] used LMD to process bearing vibration signals, and com-
bined with multi-scale entropy to recognize bearing fault patterns.
Ying et al. [11] proposed a method called permutation entropy-
based improved uniform phase empirical mode decomposition
(PEUPEMD) for fault diagnosis. Simulation signals and test data
were utilized to verify the availability. Chen et al. [12] utilized
WTD to de-noise vibration signals and reduce the interference of
noise, which can secure a higher identification accuracy for rolling

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2022.109143
0003-682X/Ó 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al.
Nomenclature
Abbreviations Interpretation
VME Variational mode extraction
I-1DCNN Improved one-dimensional convolutional neural net-
work
1DCNN One-dimensional convolutional neural network
LMD Local mean decomposition
WTD Wavelet threshold denoising
EMD Empirical mode decomposition
VMD Variational mode decomposition
PEUPEMD Permutation entropy-based improved uniform phase
empirical mode decomposition
WOA Whale optimization algorithm
SVM Support vector machine
KNN K-nearest neighbor algorithm
DT Decision tree
SMM Support matrix machine
bearing faults. Wang et al. [13] combined VMD and deep autoen-
coder to achieve an unsupervised fault diagnosis. According to
the VMD decomposition principle, Jiang et al. [14] proposed a cen-
tral frequency mode decomposition method (CFMD), and verified
the effectiveness of CFMD method in fault diagnosis through sim-
ulation and experiment. These methods have made some out-
standing achievements in mechanical fault diagnosis.
Nonetheless, LMD has some problems in signal processing, such
as end effect and mode mixing. Although WTD can achieve noise
reduction, the noise reduction effect depends on the reasonable
choice of threshold. Similar to LMD, EMD also suffers from the
drawbacks of end effect and mode mixing. VMD has fortissimo sig-
nal decomposition performance, which is extensively applied in
fault diagnosis. Nevertheless, VMD also has two problems, one is
the long decomposition time, and the other is that the decomposi-
tion capacity of VMD depends on the number of decomposition
layers [15]. To overcome these problems, Nazari et al. [16] recently
suggested VME on the basis of VMD, which is a new adaptivity sig-
nal processing method. This method has been employed by some
academics for health condition monitoring of rotating machinery.
Guo et al. [17] used the improved VME method to process the gear-
box vibration signals collected in the noise environment, and ver-
ified the strong noise reduction performance of the method
through experiments. In order to overbear the weaknesses of set-
ting parameters manually, Yan et al. [18] adopted whale optimiza-
tion algorithm (WOA) to select the optimal parameters for VME,
which gave full play to the potential of VME. Compared with
VMD, VME mainly focuses on extracting a desired mode compo-
nent, which has a better noise reduction performance and higher
computational efficiency than the acknowledged VMD [19]. There-
fore, for the purpose of reducing the noise interference of the col-
lected raw bearing vibration signal, VME method is employed to
preprocess bearing vibration signals in this paper.
Intelligent fault diagnosis of rolling bearing is widely regarded
as a pattern recognition problem. Common pattern recognition
algorithms include support vector machine (SVM) [20], K-nearest
neighbor algorithm (KNN) [21], decision tree (DT) [22], support
matrix machine (SMM) [23] and artificial neural network (ANN)
[24]. These algorithms are able to accurately identify bearing
health states, but they take a lot of time to manually extract useful
features. In addition, when the above methods are faced with vast
sample data and vibration signals containing noise, they can not
achieve satisfactory identification accuracy and efficiency. To solve
2
Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143
ANN Artificial neural network
CWT Continuous wavelet transform
MMCNN Multi-mode CNN
MTL Multitask learning
BN Batch normalization
SAM Self-attention mechanism
GAP Global average pooling
SA Self-attention
ADMM Alternating direction method of the multiplier algo-
rithm
EDM Electric discharge machining
SNR Signal to noise ratio
MPE Multi-scale permutation entropy
t-SNE t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding
DNN Deep neural network
LSTM Long short-term memory
the above problems, the convolutional neural network (CNN) [25]
is exploited for fault diagnosis. As CNN is originally used for image
processing, some scholars convert the collected bearing signals
into two-dimensional images and input them into CNN for
automatic fault identification. Zhang et al. [26] converted
one-dimensional time-domain signals into two-dimensional
time–frequency grayscale images through continuous wavelet
transform (CWT) and put them into the multi-mode CNN
(MMCNN) model for fault diagnosis. Hasan et al. [27] fused
multi-domain information of the original vibration signals into
two-dimensional composite images, and then fed the composite
images into CNN model based on multitask learning (MTL) for fault
diagnosis. Experiments testify that this method can acquire good
results in fault diagnosis. Although two-dimensional CNN can be
applied to identify-one-dimensional vibration signals, in the pro-
cess of signal dimension transformation, the correlation between
one-dimensional data is destroyed, which can beget some momen-
tous fault information to be mislaid. Therefore, one-dimensional
convolutional neural network (1DCNN) is proposed to settle these
issues. Zhang et al. [28] input original one-dimensional vibration
signals into 1DCNN model for fault identification. Wang et al.
[29] fused acoustic signals and vibration signals as the input of
1DCNN for bearing fault status identification. Habbouche et al.
[30] firstly used VMD to handle the original bearing vibration sig-
nals, and then input the processed one-dimensional signals into
1DCNN for fault diagnosis, which can accurately recognize fault
patterns. According to the above analysis, 1DCNN can be consid-
ered as a promising tool to identify bearing fault patterns.
However, for complex noisy vibration signals, the traditional
1DCNN model sometimes cannot achieve a high identification
accuracy due to its over-fitting problem. Besides, the computa-
tional burden of traditional 1DCNN is large when the training
times are set too large. Therefore, to boost the identification accu-
racy and computational efficiency of the 1DCNN model, this
research proposes the improved one-dimensional convolutional
neural network (I-1DCNN). Specifically, batch normalization (BN)
is introduced between the convolution layer and pooling layer in
traditional 1DCNN to escalate the convergence speed of the model.
Following the pooling layer, self-attention mechanism (SAM) is
introduced to highlight main features and suppress interference
features, which is able to enhance the robustness of network
model. Additionally, to minimize the parameters of entire model
and increase the computational speed of 1DCNN, global average
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

pooling (GAP) is utilized rather than the fully-connected network ^ xÞ ¼ 1

bð ð3Þ
of traditional 1DCNN. During the training period, the early stop- aðx  xnd Þ2
ping method is adopted to cut down on training time and alleviate
the problem of over-fitting. Here, the augmented Lagrange function is utilized to address
This research proposes a new intelligent fault diagnosis method the minimization constraint problem of Eq. (2), and its expression
of rolling bearing using VME and I-1DCNN. Firstly, the collected is as follows.
bearing vibration signals are preprocessed using VME. VME focuses ^ xÞ^f ðxÞjj2 þ
^ d ðxÞjj22 þ jjbð
Lðud ; xd ; kÞ ¼ ajjjðx  xd Þ½ð1 þ sgnðxÞÞu r 2
on extracting the required mode components, which can remove ^ ^ ^
jjf ðxÞ  ðu
d
2 ^
^ ðxÞ þ f ðxÞÞjj þ hkðxÞ; f ðxÞ  ðu d^ ðxÞ þ ^f ðxÞÞi
noise from the signal, especially in a strongly noisy environment. r 2 r

It creates a solid foundation for subsequent fault feature identifica- ð4Þ

tion using I-1DCNN. Subsequently, the processed bearing vibration where k is the Lagrange multiplier.
signals are fed into the I-1DCNN model for fault diagnosis. The I- Take the alternating direction method of the multiplier algo-
1DCNN model can relieve the over-fitting issue of traditional rithm (ADMM) to resolve Eq. (4). After n iterations of optimization
1DCNN and fully learn the discriminative fault features from bear-
^ nþ1 ðxÞ, xnþ1 and ^
nþ1
ing vibration signal processed by VME. The organic fusion of VME and update,u d d k ðxÞ can be expressed as Eqs. (5)–
and I-1DCNN may give full play to their potentialities and enhance (7) respectively.
recognition accuracy. Throughout this paper, the following main ^f ðxÞ þ a2 ðx  xn Þ4 u ^
^ nd ðxÞ þ kð2xÞ
innovations and contributions are emphasized: ^ nþ1
u d ðxÞ ¼
d
ð5Þ
½1 þ a2 ðx  xnd Þ4 ½1 þ 2aðx  xnd Þ2 
(1) The I-1DCNN model is proposed by introducing BN, SAM and
R 1  nþ1 2
early stopping method in the traditional 1DCNN, which can
0
xu^d ðxÞ dx
not only effectively alleviate the over-fitting problem exist- x nþ1
¼ R  2 ð6Þ
1  nþ1
^ ðxÞ dx
d
ing in the traditional 1DCNN, but also improve the computa-
0  d
u
tional efficiency of model.
(2) A new bearing intelligent fault diagnosis method is proposed
^knþ1 ðxÞ ¼ ^kn þ s½^f ðxÞ  ðu
^ d ðxÞ þ ^f r ðxÞÞ
n
by fusing VME and I-1DCNN, which can automatically ð7Þ
extract practicable fault information and boost bearing fault
where s is the step size of update iteration.
identification accuracy.
The process of variational mode extraction is shown in Fig. 1,
(3) By analyzing two different experimental data sets, the effica-
where e is the discrimination accuracy greater than zero.
ciousness and robustness of the suggested method are
demonstrated from multiple perspectives.
2.2. Traditional 1DCNN
The following is the outline of this paper. The theory of related
CNN has fortissimo capability in feature learning and has made
works (VME and traditional 1DCNN) is introduced in Section 2.
enormous breakthroughs in image processing [32] and fault diag-
Section 3 introduces the contents of the proposed method (BN,
nosis [33,34]. However, one-dimensional data are required to be
SAM and I-1DCNN) and the specific intelligent fault diagnosis
converted into two-dimensional image data for fault diagnosis in
framework. In Section 4, a variety of analyses and comparative
most CNN models. To address this issue, 1DCNN is proposed to deal
experiments illustrate the practicability and superiority of the sug-
directly with one-dimensional data. The structure diagram of the
gested method. At last, Section 5 mounts the conclusions.

2. Related works

2.1. Variational mode extraction

VME is proposed on the basis of VMD, which has the same

mathematical theory as VMD [31]. However, compared with
VMD, VME can extract the mode components at a faster speed, sav-
ing the calculation time and reducing the calculation cost. VME
decomposes the original timing signal into the following two parts:
f ðtÞ ¼ ud ðtÞ þ f r ðtÞ ð1Þ
where f ðtÞ represents the original signal, ud ðtÞ and f r ðtÞ are defined
as the main mode component and residual signal respectively.
To accurately extract the desired mode components, it is neces-
sary to ensure that ud ðtÞ is tightly around the central frequency xd
and that spectral overlap between ud ðtÞ and f r ðtÞ is minimized.
Therefore, the minimization constraints can be used to find the
desired mode components.

min fajj@ t ½ðdðtÞ þ pjtÞ  ud ðtÞejxd t jj22 þ jjbðtÞ  f r ðtÞjj22 g

ud ;xd ;f r ð2Þ
subjectto : ud ðtÞ þ f r ðtÞ ¼ f ðtÞ
here a and dðtÞ are defined the balancing factor and Dirac delta
distribution; bðtÞ represents the impulse response of the filter with
the following frequency response equation. Fig. 1. The procedure of variational mode extraction.

3
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

xi lB
traditional 1DCNN model, which contains a convolution layer, ^xi ¼ p ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
2
rB þe
pooling layer, full connected layer and classification layer [35], is ð11Þ
displayed in Fig. 2. yi ¼ c^xi þ b
In the convolution layer, the input signals are convolved by fil-
P
m
ters, followed by an activation function to generate an output lB ¼ m1 xi
eigenmatrix. The convolution operation process is: i¼1
ð12Þ
Pm  2
l l r2B ¼ m1 xi  l B
i ðjÞ ¼ ReLUðK i  x ðjÞ þ bi Þ
ylþ1 ð8Þ
l
i¼1

where ReLUðÞ and  represent activation function and convolution where xi is the data in small batch B; m is the batch size; e is a small
operation respectively; xl ðjÞ is defined as the j-th local region in constant and can be ignored; c and b respectively represent the
l
the convolutional layer l; K li and bi are the weight and bias of the scale and shift which need to be learned.
i-th convolutional kernel in the l layer respectively.
The pooling layer comes after the convolution layer. Its main 3.2. Self-attention mechanism
function is to extract main features and reduce feature dimensions.
Maximum and average pooling are two typical pooling algorithms. In 2017, Vaswani et al. [38] proposed SAM that was initially
The following is the maximum pooling expression. applied to machine translation. Many scholars have combined
SAM and deep learning to handle the problem of natural language
Plþ1
i ðjÞ ¼ max fylþ1
i ðtÞg ð9Þ [39,40] and fault diagnosis. SAM performs adaptive weighted pro-
ðj1ÞWþ16t6jW
cessing of main information by mimicking human attention. For an
where W is the width of the pooling area, P lþ1
i ðjÞ is the output fea- input sequencex ¼ fx1 ; x2 ; . . . ; xn g; xi 2 Rk , the operation steps of the
ture after the maximum pooling operation. self-attention mechanism are as follows [41]:
The fundamental capacity of the full connected layer is to splice
First, calculate the vectors qi ; ki ; v i 2 Rdk of keys, queries, and
two-dimensional features obtained by convolution and pooling
values by a linear transformation.
operations into a one-dimensional vector. The following is the
equation of the full connected layer: qi ¼ W q xi ; ki ¼ W k xi ; v i ¼ W v xi ð13Þ
!
X
m X
n
l
q
here W ; W ; W 2 R k v dk k
are parameter matrices, which need to
zlþ1 ðjÞ ¼ ReLU W litj ali ðt Þ þ bj ð10Þ
i¼1 t¼1
be learned.
Secondly, the similarity between qi and kj is calculated to obtain
l
where W litj
and are the weight and bias; ali ðtÞ represents the value
bj an attention scoreai;j .
of the t-th neuron in the i-th feature of layer l.
q k
ai;j ¼ p
i
ffiffiffiffiffij ð14Þ
dk
3. The proposed method
where dk represents the dimension ofkj .
3.1. Batch normalization Then, the softmax function is used to normalizeai;j , and the cor-
responding weight coefficient of v i is obtained.
Szegedy et al. [36] proposed BN in 2015. The idea of BN is to
expðai;j Þ
standardize each batch of training data and reduce the difference a^ i;j ¼ softmaxðai;j Þ ¼ P
n
ð15Þ
from the input feature distribution of the previous layer. BN can expðai;t Þ
not only escalate the convergence rate, but also enhance the gen- t¼1

eralization capability of the model. For a small batch of Finally, multiply v i and the corresponding weight coefficient
dataB ¼ fx1 ; x2 ;    ; xm g, the following is the computational proce- and sum to obtain the attention valuezi .
dure of BN [37]:

Fig. 2. Structure diagram of traditional 1DCNN model.

4
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

X
n
dimensions. Repeat the above operation three times with a narrow
zi ¼ a^ i;j v j ð16Þ
convolution kernel to improve the learned features.
j¼1
Secondly, the features obtained from the last pooling layer are
weighted adaptively to highlight important features and suppress
where zi is the attention ofxi . The attention value corresponding to
invalid features. Thus, the feature extraction capability and robust-
each value in x can be calculated simultaneously to form a new fea-
ness of the model are enhanced.
ture sequencez ¼ fz1 ; z2 ; . . . ; zn g. A schematic representation of self-
Thirdly, GAP is utilized to process the features obtained from
attention is presented in Fig. 3.
the self-attention (SA) layer, which can lessen the total parameters
and shorten the computation time compared to the full connected
3.3. Improved one-dimensional convolutional neural network layer. The GAP is expressed as follows:

1 Xn
The fault features contained in bearing vibration signals are yk ¼  xk ð17Þ
n i¼1 i
facilely inundated by intense noise interference signals, and pos-
sess strong non-stationary and nonlinear properties. When the tra-
where xki denotes the value corresponding to the i-th neuron of the
ditional 1DCNN is adopted to process these vibration signals, it is
k-th feature in the SA layer, n is the feature dimension.
unable to effectually extract useful feature information, thus weak-
Fourthly, the one-dimensional vector obtained from global
ening greatly feature learning competence of 1DCNN. To overcome
average pooling is input to softmax classifier. The following is
the above problems, this research proposes the I-1DCNN model.
the softmax expression:
Fig. 4 shows the structure of I-1DCNN, which consists of four con-
volutional layers, four BN layers, four pooling layers, one GAP layer, exp zo ðjÞ
one self-attention layer and one softmax layer. The following is an QðjÞ ¼ softmaxðzo ðjÞÞ ¼ ð18Þ
P
M
elaborate illustration of I-1DCNN. exp zo ðkÞ
k¼1
Firstly, a wide convolution kernel is used to convolve the input
features, which can effectively filter out the noise. The features here z ðjÞ represents logits of the j-th neuron, and M represents
o

after convolution are normalized in batches to reduce the distribu- the number of bearing fault categories.
tion differences between layers and speed up convergence. Maxi- Finally, the goal function is selected to be the cross-entropy loss
mum pooling is used to extract main features and reduce feature function, and its equation is provided in Eq. (19). The adam opti-

Fig. 3. The schematic representation of self-attention.

5
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 4. The structure of the I-1DCNN model.

mizer is used for continuous iterative optimization to facilitate 1X N X M

loss ¼  ^ji
y log y ð19Þ
minimisation of loss function values. In addition, this research N j¼1 i¼1 ji
makes use of the early stopping method throughout the model
training procedure. When the loss value of the validation set no
longer decreases, the I-1DCNN model ends the training in advance. where N and M denote the number of input samples and the num-
The model matching the smallest loss of the validation set is saved ^ji respectively
ber of bearing fault categories, respectively; yji and y
as the optimal model. The early stopping method not only cuts represent the real probability and predicted probability that sample
down the training time, but also avoids over-fitting effectively. j belongs to category i.
6
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 5. Overall framework of the proposed method.

7
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 6. Bearing data collection device at Case Western Reserve University.

Fig. 7. Schematic diagram of the overlapping sampling method.

Table 1 main mode component as sample data. Meanwhile, some noise

Details of the experimental data in case 1. interference information are eliminated efficaciously.
Fault type Damage Number of Category Step 3: Divide the data set. In the extracted sample data, 70 % of
diameter /mm samples labels all sample data are randomly selected as the training set to train
Normal (N) 0 300 1 the I-1DCNN model, 20 % of all sample data are randomly
Inner ring fault (IRF1) 0.1778 300 2 selected as the validation set to adjust the parameters of the
Inner ring fault (IRF2) 0.3556 300 3 I-1DCNN model, and the remaining samples are used as test
Inner ring fault (IRF3) 0.5334 300 4
sets to evaluate the property of the I-1DCNN model.
Outer ring fault (ORF1) 0.1778 300 5
Outer ring fault (ORF2) 0.3556 300 6 Step 4: Model training. The training set and validation set are
Outer ring fault (ORF3) 0.5334 300 7 imported into the I-1DCNN model to train and adjust parame-
Ball fault (BF1) 0.1778 300 8 ters. Meanwhile, the early stopping method in the training pro-
Ball fault (BF2) 0.3556 300 9 cess may efficaciously conquer the overfitting problem due to
Ball fault (BF3) 0.5334 300 10
too many training epochs and shorten the training time. Finally,
the well-trained I-1DCNN model is saved.
Step 5: Fault type identification. The test set is fed into the well-
trained I-1DCNN model for realizing intelligent fault identifica-
tion and obtaining the final fault diagnosis results.
3.4. Overall framework of the proposed fault diagnosis method

In order to more efficiently learn bearing fault information and
improve bearing fault diagnosis accuracy, this research proposes a
new intelligent fault diagnosis method for rolling bearing based on
VME and I-1DCNN. Firstly, bearing vibration signals are acquired
by acceleration sensors. Secondly, VME is carried out on the
acquired original vibration signals with the aim of extracting the
main mode component and eliminating some unserviceable inter-
ference information. Then, the extracted mode components are
divided into the training set, validation set and test set. Next, the
training set and validation set are input into the I-1DCNN model
for training and the well-trained I-1DCNN model is saved. Finally,
the test set is fed into the well-trained I-1DCNN model for testing
to obtain the fault diagnosis results. Fig. 5 is overall framework of
the proposed fault diagnosis method. Its particular steps are
explained below:
Step 1: Collect bearing vibration data. Acceleration sensors are
installed on the testing bearing of the experimental device to
acquire the original bearing vibration data.
Step 2: Variational modal extraction. VME method is carried out
on the collected original bearing vibration data to extract the
8
4. Experimental validation
In this section, two cases are governed to validate the availabil-
ity of the suggested method in bearing fault diagnosis. Besides,
comparisons among a variety of methods are executed to illustrate
the meliority of the suggested method in identifying bearing fault
patterns under noise environments. Of particular note is, the
experiment is operated on a PC with Intel(R) Core(TM) I7-9700
CPU and 16G RAM. Software is based on MATLAB language and
Python language TensorFlow framework to achieve.
4.1. Bearing benchmark data from CWRU
4.1.1. Description of experimental equipment and bearing data
The normal and fault data of type 6205-2RS bearing offered by
the electrical engineering laboratory of Case Western Reserve
University (CWRU) are selected as diagnostic objects for case 1
[42]. Fig. 6 presents the data acquisition system of case 1. The
whole data set contains one normal state and three damaged
states. Each damage state contains three different sizes: early fault
(damage diameter is 0.1778 mm), middle fault (damage diameter
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 8. Time-domain waveform and spectrum of 10 original bearing vibration signals.

r/min and 12 kHz, the accelerometer located in motor drive end

Fig. 9. The spectrum of IRF1 vibration signal.
is 0.3556 mm) and late fault (damage diameter is 0.5334 mm). The
above damage sizes are all machined manually using an electric
discharge machining (EDM). In the process of the experiment,
the motor speed and sampling frequency are maintained at 1772
is employed to collect bearing vibration data with normal and dif-
ferent damage states as the experimental data of case 1. Besides,
the overlapping sampling method is adopted to expand the data
set. The overlapping sampling method is shown in Fig. 7. Specifi-
cally, the over-sampling method is conducted via Eq. (20). Take a
fault signal in case 1 as an example, its total length is 121991, each
sample being 2048 in length, and the sliding window size is 256.
Therefore, according to Eq. (20), this fault signal can be divided into
469 samples at most. However, in this experiment, considering
that too many samples will cost too much model training time,
so 300 samples are only randomly selected for each health status.
That is, a total of 3000 samples are obtained. Table 1 gives specific
information about samples. Fig. 8 reveals 10 original bearing vibra-
tion signals collected. It may be wised in Fig. 8 that there is no
obvious difference between vibration signals of different health
statuses. This means that it is of great challenge to identify the
health states and severities of bearings directly. Therefore, to intel-
ligently identify bearing fault patterns, an effective fault diagnosis
method is required.
 
L  Lsample
N¼ þ1 ð20Þ
S

Table 2
Center frequency of bearing vibration signals of different fault types.

Fault type N IRF1 IRF2 IRF3 ORF1 ORF2 ORF3 BF1 BF2 BF3
Center frequency xd /Hz 1000 3500 3500 2800 2800 3400 3400 3400 3400 3400

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M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 10. Time-domain waveform and spectrum of IRF1 vibration signal before and after variational mode extraction.

Table 3
Specific parameters of the I-1DCNN model in case 1.

Layer type Filter number Kernel size Stride Activation function padding Has BN Output shape
C1 16 1024*1 16 ReLU Same Yes 128*16
P1 16 2*1 2 – Valid No 64*16
C2 32 8*1 1 ReLU Same Yes 64*32
P2 32 2*1 2 – Valid No 32*32
C3 32 4*1 1 ReLU Same Yes 32*32
P3 32 2*1 2 – Valid No 16*32
C4 64 3*1 1 ReLU Same Yes 16*64
P4 64 2*1 2 – Valid No 8*64
SA – – – – – No 8*64
GAP – – – – – No 1*64
Softmax – – – Softmax – No 10

where L represents the total length of the vibration signal, Lsample
represents the length of a sample, and S represents the sliding win-
dow size. ½ indicates the downward-rounded function.
4.1.2. Diagnosis results of the proposed method
In case 1, to verify the effectiveness of the suggested method,
the experimental data is analyzed according to the flowchart in
Fig. 5. Firstly, VME is utilized to extract main mode component
from raw vibration signals. In VME, two key parameters (i.e., the
penalty parameter a and the initial center frequency xd ) are
required to determine in advance. If the penalty parameter a is
huge, the extracted mode component will lose some useful infor-
mation. If the penalty parameter a is too small, the extracted mode
component will contain some interference information. Therefore,
according to the literature [13], this paper choosesa ¼ 1000.
Besides, the initial center frequency xd is determined based on fre-
quency value corresponding to the highest spectral peak of bearing
vibration signal. Specifically, the IRF1 vibration signal is used as an
instance. Fig. 9 shows the amplitude spectrum of IRF1 vibration
signal. By observing Fig. 9, it may be found that the frequency cor-
responding to the highest spectral peak is around 3500 Hz. There-
fore, the initial center frequency xd is selected 3500 Hz. The center
frequency of bearing vibration signals of different fault types is
exhibited in Table 2. Fig. 10 displays the extracted main mode
component. Secondly, bearing vibration data processed by VME
are divided into the training set, validation set and test set accord-
ing to 7:2:1. Then, the training set and validation set are input into
the I-1DCNN model for training. Table 3 displays the configuration
of parameters of the I-1DCNN model. Concretely, the 1024*1 wide
convolution kernel is used in the first convolution layer to effec-
tively suppress noise. Other layers use narrow convolution kernels
to improve the learned features. The convolution kernels of other
layers are 8*1, 4*1, 3*1 and 3*1, respectively. Set dropout to 0.2.
The parameter of the softmax classification layer is set to 10. The
10
small batch size and Adam optimizer initial learning rate are set
to 64 and 0.001, respectively. The maximum training iteration is
set to 500. The training result of the proposed method is revealed
in Fig. 11. As can be clearly observed in Fig. 11, the convergence
speed of the I-1DCNN model is very fast. After about 10 times of
training, the loss value and accuracy curve of the I-1DCNN model
reaches a steady state. The loss value gradually tends to 0, the
accuracy gradually tends to 1. Finally, the test set is fed into the
well-trained I-1DCNN for testing, and the result of fault diagnosis
is obtained. The diagnostic result for the test sample is given in
Fig. 12. From the confusion matrix in Fig. 12, it can be found that
the true labels and predicted labels of 300 test samples are com-
pletely consistent, and the identification accuracy reaches 100 %.
The above analysis illustrates that the suggested method possesses
excellent viability in bearing health condition identification.
4.1.3. Performance analysis under different noise levels
To simulate the collected vibration signal in the noisy environ-
ment, Gaussian white noise is mixed into the acquired raw bearing
vibration signals. Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is employed to
appraise the level of noise contained in bearing signals, and its
expression is presented below:
Psignal
SNRdB ¼ 10 logð Þ ð21Þ
Pnoise
Z T Z T
1 1
P¼ pðtÞdt ¼ jxðtÞj2 dt ð22Þ
T 0 T 0
where P is the average power of the signal xðtÞ in period T.
Take the IRF1 vibration signal as an example. Fig. 13(a)–(c) are
the original IRF1 vibration signal, the added noise signal and the
mixed IRF1 vibration signal containing noise, respectively. To illus-
trate anti-noise capacity, the proposed method is applied to bear-
ing vibration signals with different SNR values. In order to assure
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

the fairness of diagnosis results, each group of experimental data is

tested 10 times, and the average of 10 test values is received as the
ultimate diagnosis result. Table 4 reveals the accuracy with differ-
ent SNR values. When the SNR value is between 14 dB and 0 dB,
the accuracy of the suggested method is greater than 80 %. In addi-
tion, when the SNR value is set between 6 dB and 0 dB, the iden-
tification accuracy can reach 99 % above. It may be demonstrated
that the suggested method possesses fortissimo noise immunity
in case 1.

4.1.4. Effect of parameters

Convolution kernel size has a big impact on the identity capabil-
ity of the suggested method, especially in the first layer. If convo-
lution kernel size is set too small, the noise that is contained in the
input signal will not be effectively suppressed. If convolution ker-
nel size is set huge, some useful fault feature information will be
lost. This work employs a variety of convolution kernel sizes for
the analysis of bearing data with SNR = 10 dB to see how the size
of the first layer convolution kernel affects the suggested method.
Fig. 14 displays the fault diagnosis result with a variety of convolu-
tion kernel sizes. It may be discovered in Fig. 14 that fault diagnosis
accuracy boosts as the convolution kernel size multiplies in the ini-
tial stage. After convolution kernel size comes up to 1024, the fault Fig. 12. The identification result of the proposed method.

diagnosis accuracy is no longer improved. Therefore, it is appropri-

ate to select convolution kernel size in the first layer as 1024.
In the proposed method, the setting of mini-batch size is also
very important for health condition identification. To explore
how the mini-batch size impacts the suggested method, this paper
selects different mini-batch sizes to analyze bearing vibration data
with SNR = 10 dB. The identification result with different mini-
batch sizes is revealed in Fig. 15. It may be illustrated in Fig. 15,
during the beginning phases, with the multiplication of mini-
batch size, the identification accuracy is improving while the calcu-
lation time is decreasing. Nevertheless, when mini-batch size
comes up to 64, identification accuracy presents a downward trend
while the calculation time presents an upward trend. Therefore,
considering the accuracy and efficiency comprehensively, it is
effective and applicable to set mini-batch size of the proposed
method as 64 in case 1.
To verify the meliority of early stopping method, the identical
experimental data is analyzed adopting the I-1DCNN with and
without early stopping method. Table 5 illustrates the comparison
result. As is noticeable in Table 5, compared to I-1DCNN without
early stopping method, the I-1DCNN with early stopping method
can reduce training time under the premise that the recognition
accuracy is relatively high. It substantiates the cruciality and excel-
lence that early stopping method is employed in I-1DCNN.

4.1.5. Comparative experiments among different methods

To attest to the superiority and necessity of VME in the pro-
posed method, VME and some common signal preprocessing meth-
ods (e.g., VMD, EMD and WTD) are used to process the same
bearing vibration data with different SNR values. The identification
result of the I-1DCNN model with different signal preprocessing
methods is displayed in Fig. 16. When the SNR value is 2 dB
and 0 dB, the identification accuracy of four methods (i.e., the sug-
gested method, VMD-I-1DCNN, EMD-I-1DCNN and I-1DCNN with-
out preprocessing) is close to 100 %. With the diminishment in SNR
value, VME has a conspicuous advantage, and the suggested
Fig. 11. (a) The accuracy of the training set and validation set of the I-1DCNN
method possesses a significantly higher accuracy than other meth-
model; (b) the loss values of the training set and validation set of the I-1DCNN ods. When the SNR value drops down to 12 dB, the suggested
model. method still maintains accuracy of approximately 90 %, which is
11
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 13. Figures for IRF1 original vibration signal, noise signal and the IRF1 vibration signal containing noise.

Table 4
Identification results with different SNR values in case 1.

SNR (dB) 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Accuracy (%) 82.45 89.94 96.06 98.36 99.53 99.66 99.73 99.86

Fig. 14. The identification results with different convolution kernel sizes in case 1.

about 10 percentage points higher than VMD-I-1DCNN and about
30 percentage points higher than WTD-I-1DCNN. The results
demonstrate that it is very necessary to employ VME to handle
raw bearing vibration signals in advance.
The preprocessing effect of VME, VMD and EMD depends on
several parameters. The main parameters that affect VME perfor-
mance are penalty factor a and center frequencyx. VMD perfor-
mance is primarily influenced by penalty factor a and number of
IMFs k. Number of iterations m and number of IMFs k are the main
factors that influence EMD performance. In order to avoid impro-
per parameter selection leading to insufficient performance of sig-
nal preprocessing method and affecting final diagnosis results,
different parameters are handpicked to analyze bearing vibration
signal with SNR = 10 dB. Table 6 parades the preprocessing
results of VME, VME and EMD under different parameters. The
recognition accuracy of employing VME may be increased to

12
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 15. Identification accuracy and time with different mini-batch sizes in case 1.

in advance, this paper uses multi-scale permutation entropy (MPE)

Table 5
The identification results with early stopping method and without early stopping [43] to extract the main features of experimental data processed by
method. VME. The main feature dimension extracted is 10. Fig. 17 presents
the fault diagnosis result of six methods. When the SNR value is
Identification method Number of Accuracy Time
iterations (%) (s) 0 dB, the identification accuracy of both I-1DCNN and traditional
1DCNN can reach more than 95 %, while other four methods
I-1DCNN without early stopping 10 92.00 22.47
method 20 95.33 32.03 achieve an identification accuracy of around 90 %. With the decline
30 91.66 39.77 in SNR value, the identification accuracy of six approaches shows a
50 95.33 58.12 decreasing trend, and the advantage of I-1DCNN gradually
80 97.00 82.55 emerges. When the SNR is 10 dB, the identification accuracy of
100 97.00 102.24
the I-1DCNN is still above 95 %, whereas the accuracy of the tradi-
I-1DCNN with early stopping 24 97.00 34.52
method tional 1DCNN is lower than 90 %. The identification accuracy of
LSTM is about 75 %, while the accuracy of SVM, DNN and KNN
are all below 70 %. The outcome substantiates that compared with
96.06 % by determining the center frequency in accordance with subsisting representative classification models, I-1DCNN not only
the maximum peak spectrum and opting penalty factor as 1000. possesses superiority in fault pattern identification, but also pro-
However, no matter how the parameters of VMD and EMD are vides better robustness to noise.
adjusted, their recognition accuracy of employing VMD and EMD
is lower than that of employing VME.
To examine the superiority of the presented I-1DCNN model, six 4.1.6. Data visualization
approaches (i.e., I-1DCNN, traditional 1DCNN, deep neural network To make the feature learning process of the suggested method
(DNN), KNN, long short-term memory (LSTM) and SVM) are distinctly visible, this paper uses t-distributed stochastic neighbor
adopted to analyze the same experimental data processed by embedding (t-SNE) to convert the high-dimensional features into
VME. Since SVM and KNN are required to obtain artificial features two dimensions, and visualize them by a two-dimensional scatter

Fig. 16. The identification results of the I-1DCNN model with different signal preprocessing methods.

13
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Table 6 ity, which consists primarily of a data acquisition unit, a motor

Preprocessing results of VME, VME and EMD under different parameters. control unit, a loading device, a signal amplifier and a test unit
Preprocessing Key parameters Parameter Accuracy (see Fig. 19(b)). Table 7 presents the specific explication of the
method selection (%) HRB6205 bearing employed for case 2. During data acquisition
VME Penalty factor and center (2000, 500) 66.99 stage, the motor speed and sampling frequency are set as 1050 r/
frequency (a; x) (600, 2200) 67.66 min and 12 kHz, respectively. The data acquired includes one nor-
(4000, 3000) 82.72 mal state and six fault states with damage sizes of 1 mm. Table 8
(1500, 4000) 62.83
(1000, xd ) 96.06
particularizes 7 health states. The above fault sizes are all
machined manually using an EDM. Three fault types of case 2 are
VMD Penalty factor and number of (1200, 4) 88.92
displayed in Fig. 20. Similarly, 300 samples are picked for each
IMFs (a; k) (2000, 6) 91.24
(3000, 8) 66.16 health state by overlapping sampling, giving a total of 2100 sam-
(500, 10) 65.32 ples selected. Fig. 21 reveals 7 original bearing vibration signals
(6000, 15) 68.46 collected. As the spectrum and time-domain waveform of different
EMD Number of iterations and (400, 4) 82.08 health states have a certain similarity, directly identifying the
number of IMFs (m, k) (150, 5) 79.79 bearing health status through viewing Fig. 21 is extremely chal-
(220, 6) 82.06
lenging. Hence, to automatically identify bearing health status,
(180, 7) 78.19
(50, 8) 81.52 an effective fault diagnosis method is required.

* The specific value of xd is listed in Table 2.

diagram. Fig. 18 exhibits feature visualization result of each layer.
In the input layer and convolution layer 1, the features of all cate-
gories are evenly distributed. In convolution layer 2, features of the
same category are beginning to assemble, but the distinction
between the different categories is still not very clear. In convolu-
tion layer 3 and convolution layer 4, the distinction between differ-
ent categories is obvious, but there are still a few features that are
not completely gathered together. In the self-attention layer and
the GAP layer, features that belong to the same category are
grouped, and the distance between different categories is large,
which can well distinguish the 10 bearing health states in case 1.
The t-SNE data visualization result further demonstrates that the
proposed method allows excellent learning of the primary feature
of bearing vibration signals and possesses terrific fault identifica-
tion ability.
4.2. Case 2: Bearing vibration data from laboratory
4.2.1. Description of experimental equipment and bearing data
Bearing vibration data from the laboratory are selected to esti-
mate the suggested method. Fig. 19 depicts the experimental facil-
4.2.2. Diagnosis results of the proposed method
In case 2, to illustrate the effectiveness of the suggested
method, the experimental data are utilized to analyze according
to the flowchart in Fig. 5. Firstly, VME is employed to achieve the
main mode component from raw bearing signals. Similarly, choose
a ¼ 1000 in case 2. The initial center frequency xd is determined
according to the maximum spectral peak of bearing vibration sig-
nals. Specifically, the IRF vibration signal is used as an instance.
Fig. 22 displays the spectrum of the IRF vibration signal. By viewing
Fig. 22, it may be discovered that the maximum spectral peak cor-
responds to a frequency of roughly 900 Hz. Therefore, the initial
center frequencyxd = 900 Hz is selected. Table 9 exposes the center
frequency of bearing vibration signals of different fault types.
Fig. 23 displays the extracted main mode component. Secondly,
according to the 7:2:1 guideline, the bearing data processed by
VME are separated into the training set, validation set, and test
set. Then, the training set and validation set are fed into the I-
1DCNN model for training. Table 10 expounds on the specific
parameters of the I-1DCNN. 512*1 wide convolution kernel is
employed in the first layer, and the configurations of other param-
eters are consistent with those in case 1. In the course of training,
the early stopping method is introduced to boost training
efficiency and avert over-fitting. The training consequence of

Fig. 17. The identification results of different classification models.

14
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 18. Visualization results of the suggested method in case 1.

Fig. 19. Experimental device for case 2.

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M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Table 7
A specific description of the experimental bearing in case 2.

Bearing type Inside diameter Roll diameter Outside diameter Number of the roller Contact angle (°)
HRB 6205 25 mm 7.94 mm 52 mm 9 0

Table 8
The elaborate depiction of the sample set in case 2. suggested method is revealed in Fig. 24. The I-1DCNN model does
not converge in the early stage of training, but after 30 sessions of
Fault type Number Category
training, the loss value and accuracy curve of the model tended to
of samples label
be stable. The loss value gradually tends to 0, the accuracy gradu-
Normal(N) 300 1
ally tends to 1. Finally, the test sample is fed into the well-trained
Outer ring fault (ORF) 300 2
Inner ring fault (IRF) 300 3
I-1DCNN for testing, and the identification result of bearing data in
Ball fault (BF) 300 4 case 2 is obtained. The identification consequence of test sample
Inner and outer ring compound fault (OIF) 300 5 set is illustrated in Fig. 25. The real labels of the 210 test samples
Outer ring and ball compound fault (OBF) 300 6 exactly matched the predicted labels with 100 % identification
Inner and outer ring and ball compound fault (OIBF) 300 7

Fig. 20. Three fault types of rolling bearing.

Fig. 21. Time-domain waveform and spectrum of 7 original vibration signals in case 2.

16
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

lists a variety of identification accuracy. The identification accuracy

is more than 90 % when the SNR value is between 12 dB and 0 dB.
Furthermore, when SNR value ranges from 4 dB to 0 dB, the iden-
tification accuracy is near 100 %. This shows that the suggested
method possesses fortissimo robustness to noise.

4.2.4. Effect of parameters

Fig. 22. The spectrum of IRF vibration signal in case 2.
accuracy. The result manifests that the presented method is work-
able in bearing health status monitoring.
4.2.3. Performance analysis under different noise levels
To certify noise immunity of the suggested method, the bearing
vibration signals with different SNR values are analyzed. Table 11
To investigate how the size of the first layer convolution kernel
affects the proposed method, different convolution kernel sizes are
selected for analysis of bearing vibration signals with SNR = 10
dB. Fig. 26 presents the fault diagnosis result with different convo-
lution kernel sizes. By viewing Fig. 26, it is very distinct that the
identification accuracy is the highest (97.13 %) when convolution
kernel size comes up to 512. Therefore, in case 2, it is suitable to
select convolution kernel size in the first layer to 512.
To research the impact of mini-batch size on the suggested
method, different mini-batch sizes are used to test the same bear-
ing data. Fig. 27 displays the fault diagnosis result with different
mini-batch sizes. In the beginning, with the increase of mini-
batch size, the accuracy curve tends to rise, while the time curve
presents a downward trend. The least time and highest accuracy
of the proposed method are achieved when mini-batch size is 64.
When mini-batch size continues to increase, the identification
accuracy does not change significantly, but calculation time
increases greatly. Therefore, it is reasonable and viable to set
mini-batch size as 64 in case 2.

Table 9
Center frequency of bearing vibration signals of different fault types.

Fault type N ORF IRF BF OIF OBF ORBF

Center frequency xd /Hz 1000 1400 900 1600 1600 1800 900

Fig. 23. Time-domain waveform and spectrum of IRF vibration signals before and after variational mode extraction.

Table 10
Specific parameters of the I-1DCNN model in case 2.

Layer type Filter number Kernel size Stride Activation function padding Has BN Output shape
C1 16 512*1 16 ReLU same Yes 128*16
P1 16 2*1 2 – valid No 64*16
C2 32 8*1 1 ReLU same Yes 64*32
P2 32 2*1 2 – valid No 32*32
C3 32 4*1 1 ReLU same Yes 32*32
P3 32 2*1 2 – valid No 16*32
C4 64 3*1 1 ReLU same Yes 16*64
P4 64 2*1 2 – valid No 8*64
SA – – – – – No 8*64
GAP – – – – – No 1*64
Softmax – – – Softmax – No 10

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M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

To certify the advantage of employing early stopping method,

the presented method with and without early stopping method
are respectively to analyze the same bearing data with SNR = 1
0 dB. Table 12 exhibits the comparison result. It may be found
noticeably from Table 12 that I-1DCNN with early stopping
method can be performed in a shorter period of time to provide
the highest recognition accuracy compared to I-1DCNN without
early stopping method. This comparative result substantiates the
necessity and preponderance of employing early stopping method.

4.2.5. Comparative experiments among different methods

To demonstrate the necessity of using VME on the proposed
method, this paper adopts the proposed method and several other
diagnosis methods (e.g., VMD-I-1DCNN, EMD-I-1DCNN, WTD-I-
1DCNN and I-1DCNN without preprocessing) to analyze the same
bearing data with different SNR values. The identification result
of different methods is presented in Fig. 28. When the SNR value
is 0 dB, the accuracy of four methods (i.e., the proposed method,
VMD-I-1DCNN, EMD-I-1DCNN and I-1DCNN without preprocess-
ing) can reach more than 99 %. However, the suggested method
possesses a prominent preponderance that the accuracy is mark-
edly higher than other methods with the decrease in SNR value.
When the SNR value shortens to 14 dB, the accuracy of presented
method is about 90 %, which is about 10 percentage points higher
than VMD-I-1DCNN and about 20 percentage points higher than I-
1DCNN without preprocessing. The results display that it is vital to
employ VME to handle bearing vibration signals in advance.
To ensure the fairness and reliability of comparison results,
multiple combination parameters are selected to analyze the pre-
processing capabilities of VME, VMD and EMD. Bearing vibration
signal with SNR = 10 dB is taken as the research object. Table 13
parades preprocessing results of VME, VME and EMD under differ-
ent parameters. In VME, the identification accuracy can be up to
97.13 % when selecting appropriate parameters. In VMD and
EMD, the highest recognition accuracy is 91.24 % and 84.66 %,
respectively. This further establishes that VME owns stouter pre-
processing capability compared with VMD and EMD in signal
Fig. 24. (a) The accuracy of the training set and validation set of the I-1DCNN
model; (b) the loss values of the training set and validation set of the I-1DCNN
preprocessing.
model. To estimate the superiority of the presented I-1DCNN, the same
experimental data are analyzed by using I-1DCNN, traditional
1DCNN, SVM, KNN, DNN and LSTM. The fault diagnosis result of
six methods is presented in Fig. 29. The identification accuracy of
I-1DCNN with different SNR values is higher than other five mod-
els. When the SNR value is reduced to 12 dB, I-1DCNN still pos-
sesses higher than 90 % identification accuracy, that of traditional
1DCNN is about 85 %, that of LSTM is about 70 %, and that of
SVM, KNN and DNN are all lower than 70 %. This proves the supe-
riority of adopting I-1DCNN on the proposed method. Furthermore,
I-1DCNN has better robustness to noise compared with the exist-
ing representative classification models.

4.2.6. Data visualization

To distinctly observe the feature learning process of the sug-
gested method, this paper adopts t-SNE visualization technology
to display the feature learning results of each layer. Fig. 30 shows
the visualization results of each layer. The learned features are dif-
ficult to distinguish in the first three layers. In convolution layer 3
and convolution layer 4, learned features are gradually separated.
In the SA layer and GAP layer, features of each category are com-
pletely aggregated. 7 bearing health states in case 2 can be easily
distinguished. The t-SNE data visualization results further
demonstrate that the proposed method allows excellent learning
Fig. 25. The identification result of the suggested method in case 2. of the primary feature of bearing vibration signal and possesses
marvelous fault identification ability in case 2.
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M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Table 11
Identification accuracy with different SNR values.

SNR (dB) 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Accuracy (%) 88.96 93.33 97.13 97.25 98.8 99.28 99.61 99.81

Fig. 26. Identification results with different convolution kernel sizes.

Fig. 27. Identification accuracy and identification time with different mini-batch sizes.

Table 12 5. Conclusions
The identification results with early stopping method and without early stopping
method.
This research proposes a new intelligent fault diagnosis method
Identification method Number of Accuracy Time for rolling bearing based on variational mode extraction and
iterations (%) (s) improved one-dimensional convolutional neural network, which
I-1DCNN without early stopping method 10 13.33 16.41 can effectually wipe noises in the original vibration signals and
30 89.52 25.26 boost the identification accuracy of rolling bearing under
50 83.80 35.50
70 94.76 42.11
noise environments. The effectiveness and superiority of the
100 97.14 55.03 suggested method are verified by experiments and comparative
200 96.66 69.08 analysis. The following main innovations and contributions are
I-1DCNN with early stopping method 61 97.61 38.24 emphasized:

19
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 28. Identification results of the I-1DCNN model with different signal preprocessing methods.

Table 13
Preprocessing results of VME, VME and EMD under different parameters. (1) A new model named improved one-dimensional convolu-
Preprocessing Key parameters Parameter Accuracy
tional neural network is proposed by introducing batch nor-
method selection (%) malization, self-attention mechanism and an early stopping
VME Penalty factor and center (500, 500) 83.33
method in traditional one-dimensional convolutional neural
frequency (a; x) (2000, 3000) 62.01 network, which can more efficiently learn fault features and
(4000, 3000) 82.72 alleviate the over-fitting problem of traditional one-
(1500, 4000) 61.31 dimensional convolutional neural network.
(1000, xd ) 97.13
(2) A bearing intelligent fault diagnosis method is proposed by
VMD Penalty factor and number of (1000, 9) 90.18 fusing variational mode extraction with improved one-
IMFs (2000, 6) 91.24
dimensional convolutional neural network. The proposed
(a; k) (3200, 14) 87.42
(800, 4) 92.13 method may acquire a satisfactory consequence in two
(6000,20) 83.71 groups of experimental data, even in a strong noise
EMD Number of iterations and (80, 4) 82.94 environment.
number of IMFs (m, k) (200, 5) 83.14 (3) Compared with other representative methods, the suggested
(140, 8) 82.09 fault diagnosis method may identify the fault pattern of roll-
(450, 6) 84.66 ing bearing more accurately, which substantiates the superi-
(50, 7) 82.37
ority of the suggested method in bearing health monitoring.
* The specific value of xd is presented in Table 9.

Fig. 29. Identification results of different models in case 2.

20
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

Fig. 30. The visualization results of the proposed method in case 2.

Moreover, when the SNR value ranges from 10 dB to 0 dB, Data availability
the proposed method may acquire identification accuracy of
more than 95 %, indicating that the suggested method pos- The data that has been used is confidential.
sesses strong anti-noise performance.

Declaration of Competing Interest

It is important to highlight that bearing vibration data adopted
in the research are collected in a constant condition, but working
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
condition (speed and load) of rolling bearings is changing in prac-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
tical application. Hence, the proposed method will be devoted to
to influence the work reported in this paper.
analyzing bearing vibration data under different rotating speeds
in our future research.
Acknowledgments

CRediT authorship contribution statement This research was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No.: 52005265), the Natural Science Fund
Maoyou Ye: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writ- for Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (No.:
ing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Xiaoan Yan: Fund- 20KJB460002), Macau Young Scholars Program (No.:
ing acquisition, Software, Writing – review & editing. Ning Chen: AM2021002). Meanwhile, the authors would like to thank the edi-
Supervision. Minping Jia: Project administration, Resources. tors and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
21
M. Ye, X. Yan, N. Chen et al. Applied Acoustics 202 (2023) 109143

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