A Low-Delay Lightweight Recurrent Neural Network (LLRNN) for Rotating Machinery Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

Fault diagnosis is critical to ensuring the safety and reliable operation of rotating machinery systems. Long short-term memory networks (LSTM) have received a great deal of attention in this field. Most of the LSTM-based fault diagnosis methods have too many parameters and calculation, resulting in large memory occupancy and high calculation delay. Thus, this paper proposes a low-delay lightweight recurrent neural network (LLRNN) model for mechanical fault diagnosis, based on a special LSTM cell structure with a forget gate. The input vibration signal is segmented into several shorter sub-signals in order to shorten the length of the time sequence. Then, these sub-signals are sent into the network directly and converted into the final diagnostic results without any manual participation. Compared with some existing methods, our experiments illustrate that the proposed method has less memory space occupancy and lower computational delay while maintaining the same level of accuracy.