Interactive Hybrid Model for Remaining Useful Life Prediction with Uncertainty Quantification of Bearing in Nuclear Circulating Water Pump

Journal bearings are the key components of the nuclear circulating water pump (NCWP), and accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is of great significance for improving the reliability, safety, and maintenance planning of NCWP. However, it is difficult to quantify the uncertainty of bearing RUL based on the current deep learning (DL) model, resulting in a lack of credibility and effective convincing for RUL predicted by the model. Meanwhile, all existing hybrid models are basically simple combinations, and they cannot solve the uncertainty quantification problem of RUL predicted by DL. Hence, the bearing RUL prediction method based on a dynamic interactive hybrid model is proposed. Firstly, a degradation model based on a nonlinear enhanced generalized Wiener process (EGWP) is proposed, which combines gated neural networks and time-varying drift coefficients to describe the nonlinear degradation process of bearing. Then, a corrective gated recurrent unit (CGRU) network is designed to learn and predict real-time degradation increments, and the parameters of the degradation model are dynamically updated through the history and prediction of degradation increments. Finally, the bearing RUL prediction is given by the CGRU network, and the probability density function (PDF) of RUL is given by the proposed hybrid model. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using the PHM 2012 bearing dataset and the NCWP journal bearing dataset. The results show that our proposed method can effectively predict bearing RUL and its uncertainty.