An Energy-Efficient Fault Diagnosis Method for Subsea Main Shaft Bearings

Main shaft bearings are among the critical rotating components of subsea drilling rigs, and their health status directly affects the efficiency and reliability of the drilling system. However, in the high-pressure liquid environment of the deep sea, with intense noise, the vibration signals of the bearings attenuate rapidly. As a result, fault-related features have a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which poses a challenge for bearing health monitoring. In recent years, Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based fault diagnosis methods for subsea drilling rig bearings have become a research hotspot in the field due to their strong potential for deep fault feature mining. Nevertheless, their reliance on high-power-consumption computational resources restricts their widespread application in subsea monitoring scenarios. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis method for the main-spindle bearings of subsea drilling rigs that combines population coding with an adaptive-threshold k-winner-take-all (k-WTA) mechanism. The method exploits the noise robustness of population coding and the sparse activation induced by the adaptive k-WTA mechanism, achieving a noise-robust and energy-efficient fault diagnosis scheme for the main-spindle bearings of subsea drilling rigs. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. In accuracy and generalization experiments on the CWRU benchmark dataset, the proposed method achieves good diagnostic accuracy that is not inferior to other SOTA methods, indicating relatively strong generalization and robustness. On the Paderborn real-bearing benchmark dataset, the results highlight the importance of selecting features that are adapted to specific operating conditions. Additionally, in the noise robustness and energy efficiency experiments, the proposed method shows advantages in both noise resistance and energy efficiency.