A small sample bearing fault diagnosis method based on ConvGRU relation network

Considering that in the fault diagnosis of bearing based on relation network, using the sample mean value as the class prototype for each class is susceptible to outliers, resulting in inaccurate class prototypes, this paper proposes a convolutional gate recurrent unit (ConvGRU) relation network fault diagnosis model; firstly, the model utilizes a embedding module to extract bearing fault features, and then uses the ConvGRU as a learnable class prototype generator to generate class prototypes for each class. Secondly, a relation module is utilized to measure the similarity between class prototypes and the sample features of the query set, obtaining relation scores, and ultimately achieving fault diagnosis. In order to test the validity and advantages of the model, experimental verification and analysis were conducted on the case western storage rolling bearing dataset. The results of the experiment show that the class prototypes generated by the ConvGRU class prototype generation module have better discrimination and accuracy compared to the class prototypes generated by the relation network. In the 10-way 5-shot experiment, the accuracy of the model proposed in this paper reaches 99.60%, which increases by 6.63%, 5.10%, 4.80%, and 1.75% compared to k-nearest neighbor, convolutional neural network, prototypical network, and relation network. The method proposed in this paper helps to generate more accurate class prototypes and has a certain effect on improving the accuracy of model fault diagnosis.