Sparse auto-encoder with regularization method for health indicator construction and remaining useful life prediction of rolling bearing

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction, allowing for mechanical predictive maintenance, reduces unplanned and expensive maintenance greatly. One of the great challenges of data-driven RUL prediction is to extract the features that describe the actual degradation process. This paper presents a health indicator (HI) construction method based on a sparse auto-encoder with regularization (SAEwR) model for rolling bearings. This paper includes two modules, HI construction and RUL prediction. In the stage of the HI construction, the original features are compressed and extracted by the SAEwR model. The extracted features are sorted according to the trendability, and the features with large trendability are selected to construct the HI by using minimum quantization error. In the module of RUL prediction, the maximum likelihood estimation method is used to estimate the parameters of the prediction model, and a particle filter-based RUL prediction with degradation model is proposed. The proposed method is benchmarked with variational auto-encoder, auto-encoder methods and principal component analysis. The data from PRONOSTIA and ABLT-1A platform support the value of our approach. (paper)