Multibranch and Multiscale CNN for Fault Diagnosis of Wheelset Bearings Under Strong Noise and Variable Load Condition

The critical issue for fault diagnosis of wheel-set bearings in high-speed trains is to extract fault features from vibration signals. To handle high complexity, strong coupling, and low signal-to-noise ratio of the vibration signals, this article proposes a novel multibranch and multiscale convolutional neural network that can automatically learn and fuse abundant and complementary fault information from the multiple signal components and time scales of the vibration signals. The proposed method combines the conventional filtering methods and the idea of the multiscale learning, which can extend the breadth and depth of the feature learning process. Consequently, the proposed network can perform better. The experimental results on the wheelset bearing dataset demonstrate that the proposed method has better antinoise ability and load domain adaptability and can diagnose 12 fault types more accurately when compared with the five state-of-the-art networks.