Motor Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on Current Signal Using Time–Frequency Channel Attention

Abstract

As they are the core components of the drive motor in electric vehicles, the accurate fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is the key to ensuring the safe operation of electric vehicles. At present, intelligent diagnostic methods based on current signals (CSs) are widely used owing to the advantages of the easy collection, low cost, and non-invasiveness of CSs. However, in practical applications, the fault characteristics of the CS are weak, resulting in diagnostic performance that fails to meet the expected standards. In this paper, a diagnosis method is proposed to address this problem and enhance the diagnosis accuracy. Firstly, CSs from two phases are processed by periodic resampling to enhance data features, which are then fused through splicing operations. Subsequently, a feature enhancement module is constructed using multi-scale feature fusion for decomposing the input. Finally, a diagnosis model is constructed by using an improved channel attention module (CAM) for enhancing the diagnosis performance. The results from experiments containing two different types of bearing datasets show that the proposed method can extract high-quality fault features and improve the diagnosis accuracy, presenting great potential in intelligent fault diagnosis and the maintenance of electric vehicles.