Prognostics for Rotating Machinery Using Variational Mode Decomposition and Long Short-Term Memory Network

Rotating machinery prognostics plays an important role in promoting reliability and efficiency in the operation of machinery and reducing maintenance costs. This paper proposes a novel bearing remaining useful life prediction approach which puts emphasis on deriving effective features from raw vibration data. To enhance the degradation feature extraction, a non-recursive method named variational mode decomposition (VMD) is adopted to decompose the raw vibration data into several principal modes, then feature smoothing with a local regression filter is performed and some suitable features are selected by evaluating feature fitness using monotonicity and correlation analysis. Based on the selected features, long short-term memory (LSTM) network is introduced for bearings RUL prediction. Numerical experiments with real bearing dataset exhibit the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach in comparison to other data-driven approaches.