Accurate Recognition Method for Rolling Bearing Failure of Mine Hoist in Strong Noise Environment

The operating environment of rolling bearings in mine hoists is complicated, and detecting their faults is hindered by a weak and unstable initial vibration signal. This directly affects the ability to extract pertinent fault features. This paper puts forward an adaptive fault diagnosis method for rolling bearings that combines the Variational Modal Decomposition (VMD) model and Vision Transformer (ViT) deep learning network model. The objective was to address the difficulty of extracting relevant fault features from bearing vibration signals in environments with strong noise levels. First, an improved VMD+ViT model was used to remove the strong noise from the original bearing signal and adaptively classify the fault types; then, the impacts of modal components and encoder numbers on the accuracy of fault diagnosis were explored. Finally, the proposed methodology was validated by applying it to actual rolling bearing fault data, including both open-source and fault test datasets. The research findings indicated that employing a VMD+ViT integrated model consisting of one modal component with the highest Pearson correlation coefficient and eight encoders resulted in high accuracy in diagnosing faults, even in the presence of high levels of noise in the bearing’s vibration signal. The proposed diagnostic method achieved a diagnostic accuracy of over 92.70% on the open-source bearing dataset with strong interference noise and over 98.62% on the fault test dataset. The proposed method exhibited high accuracy and strong robustness, making it suitable for effectively diagnosing and accurately identifying different categories of rolling bearing faults in mine hoists, even in environments with high levels of noise.