Given the complexity of the operating conditions of rolling bearings in the actual rolling process of a hot mill and the difficulty in collecting data pertinent to fault bearings comprehensively, this paper proposes an approach that diagnoses the faults of a rolling mill bearing by employing the improved sparrow search algorithm deep belief network (ISAA-DBN) with limited data samples. First, the fast spectral kurtosis approach is adopted to convert the non-stationary original vibration signals collected by the acceleration sensors installed at the axial and radial ends of the rolling mill bearings into two-dimensional (2D) spectral kurtosis time-frequency images with higher feature recognition, and the principal component analysis (PCA) technique is used to decrease the dimension of the data in order to achieve a high diagnosis rate with a limited number of samples. Subsequently, the sparrow search algorithm (SSA) is used to realize the intelligent optimized self-adaptive function of a deep belief network (DBN). Furthermore, the firefly disturbance algorithm is employed to improve the spatial search capability and robustness of SSA-DBN in order to achieve better performance of the ISSA-DBN method. Finally, the proposed approach is experimentally compared to other approaches used for diagnosis. The results show that the proposed approach not only retains the useful features of the data through dimension reduction but also improves the efficiency of the diagnosis and achieves the highest diagnosis accuracy with limited data samples. In addition, the optimal position of the sensor for diagnosing rolling mill roll faults is identified.
Keywords: 2D spectral kurtosis image; ISSA-DBN; limited samples; rearing fault diagnosis; rolling mill.