Contact fatigue is one of the most common failure forms of typical basic components such as bearings and gears. Accurate prediction of contact fatigue performance degradation trends in components is conducive to the scientific formulation of maintenance strategies and health management of equipment, which is of great significance for industrial production. In this paper, to realize the performance degradation trend prediction accurately, a prediction method based on multi-domain features and temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) was proposed. Firstly, a multi-domain and high-dimensional feature set of vibration signals was constructed, and performance degradation indexes with good sensitivity and strong trends were initially screened using comprehensive evaluation indexes. Secondly, the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) method was used to eliminate redundant information among multi-domain features and construct health indexes (HIs) based on a convolutional autoencoder (CAE) network. Then, the performance degradation trend prediction model based on TCN was constructed, and the degradation trend prediction for the monitored object was realized using direct multi-step prediction. On this basis, the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified using a bearing common-use data set, and it was successfully applied to performance degradation trend prediction for rolling contact fatigue specimens. The results show that using KPCA can reduce the feature set from 14 dimensions to 4 dimensions and retain 98.33% of the information in the original preferred feature set. The method of constructing the HI based on CAE is effective, and change processes versus time of the constructed HI can truly reflect the degradation process of rolling contact fatigue specimen performance; this method has obvious advantages over the two commonly used methods for constructing HIs including auto-encoding (AE) networks and gaussian mixture models (GMMs). The model based on TCN can accurately predict the performance degradation of rolling contact fatigue specimens. Compared with prediction models based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and gating recurrent units (GRUs), the model based on TCN has better performance and higher prediction accuracy. The RMS error and average absolute error for a prediction step of 3 are 0.0146 and 0.0105, respectively. Overall, the proposed method has universal significance and can be applied to predict the performance degradation trend of other mechanical equipment/parts.
Keywords: contact fatigue; convolutional autoencoder (CAE); degradation prediction; feature extraction; health indexes (HIs); temporal convolutional network (TCN).