Multi-sensor data fusion is a feasible technique to achieve accurate and robust results in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery under complex conditions. However, the problem of information losses is always ignored during the fusion process. To solve above problem, an ensemble convolutional neural network model is proposed for bearing fault diagnosis. The framework of the proposed model contains three convolutional neural network branches: one multi-channel fusion convolutional neural network branch and two 1-D convolutional neural network branches. The former branch extracts the coupling features based on multi-sensor data and the latter two branches extract the inherent features based on single-sensor data, which can collect comprehensive fault information and reduce information losses. Furthermore, the support vector machine ensemble strategy is employed to fuse the results of multiple branches, which can improve the generalization and robustness of the proposed model. The experiments show that the proposed can obtain more effective and robust results than other methods.
Keywords: convolutional neural network; ensemble model; fault diagnosis; multi-sensor fusion; rotating machinery.