Bearing Remaining Useful Life Prediction Based on a Scaled Health Indicator and a LSTM Model with Attention Mechanism

Rotor systems are of considerable importance in most modern industrial machinery, and the evaluation of the working conditions and longevity of their core component-the rolling bearing-has gained considerable research interest. In this study, a scale-normalized bearing health indicator based on the improved phase space warping (PSW) and hidden Markov model regression was established. This indicator was then used as the input for the encoder-decoder LSTM neural network with an attention mechanism to predict the rolling bearing RUL. Experiments show that compared with traditional health indicators such as kurtosis and root mean square (RMS), this scale-normalized bearing health indicator directly indicates the actual damage degree of the bearing, thereby enabling the LSTM model to predict RUL of the bearing more accurately.