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In actual production, bearings are usually in a normal working state, which results in a lack of data for fault diagnosis (FD). Yet, the majority of existing studies on FD of rolling bearings focus on scenarios with ample fault data, while research on diagnosing small-sample bearings remains scarce. Therefore, this study presents an FD method for small-sample bearings, employing variational-mode decomposition and Symmetric Dot Pattern, combined with a pre-trained and fine-tuned Residual Network18 (VSDP-TLResNet18). The approach utilizes variational-mode decomposition (VMD) to break down the signal, determining the k value and the best Intrinsic-Mode Function (IMF) component based on center frequency and kurtosis criteria. Following this, the chosen IMF component is converted into a two-dimensional image using the Symmetric Dot Pattern (SDP) transform. In order to maximize the discrimination between two-dimensional fault images, Pearson correlation analysis is carried out on the parameters of SDP to select the optimal parameters. Finally, we use the pre-trained and fine-tuned method combined with ResNet18 for small-sample FD to improve the diagnosis accuracy of the model. Relative to alternative approaches, the suggested method demonstrates strong performance when dealing with small-sample FD.

In order to cope with the influences of noise interference and variable load on rolling bearing fault diagnosis in real industrial environments, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on CBAM_ResNet and ACON activation function is proposed. Firstly, the collected bearing working vibration signals are made into input samples to retain the original features to the maximum extent. Secondly, the CBAM_ResNet fault diagnosis model is constructed. By taking advantage of the convolutional neural network (CNN) in classification tasks and key feature extraction, the convolutional block attention module network (CBAM) is embedded in the residual blocks, to avoid model degradation and enhance the interaction of information in channel and spatial, raise the key feature extraction capability of the model. Finally, the Activate or Not (ACON) activation function, is introduced to adaptively activate shallow features for the purpose of improving the model’s feature representation and generalization capability. The bearing dataset of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is used for experiments, and the average accuracy of the proposed method is 97.68% and 93.93% under strong noise interference and variable load, respectively. Compared with the other three published bearing fault diagnosis methods, the results indicate that this proposed method has better noise immunity and generalization ability, and has good application value.

For safe maintenance and to reduce the risk of mechanical faults, the remaining useful life (RUL) estimate of bearings is significant. The typical methods of bearings’ RUL prediction suffer from low prediction accuracy because of the difficulty in extracting features. With the aim of improving the accuracy of RUL prediction, an approach based on multi-branch improved convolutional network (MBCNN) with global attention mechanism combined with bi-directional long- and short-term memory (BiLSTM) network is proposed for bearings’ RUL prediction. Firstly, the original vibration signal is fast Fourier transformed to obtain the frequency domain signal and then normalized. Secondly, the original signal and the frequency domain signal are input into the designed MBCNN network as two branches to extract the spatial features, and then input into the BiLSTM network to further extract the timing features, and the RUL of bearings is mapped by the fully connected network to achieve the purpose of prediction. Finally, an example validation was performed on a publicly available bearing degradation dataset. Compared with some existing prediction methods, the mean absolute and root mean square errors of the predictions were reduced by “22.2%” to “50.0%” and “26.1%” to “52.8%”, respectively, which proved the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.