End-to-End Deep Learning Pipeline for Multi-Sensor Aircraft Engine Vibration Fault Diagnosis

Aero-engine safety and prognostics and health management (PHM) rely on robust vibration-based fault diagnosis. However, many deep learning studies on rotating machinery are evaluated under random train–test splits that mix hardware instances and may obscure the domain shift faced in deployment. This paper presents a protocol-driven end-to-end baseline for multi-sensor aero-engine-relevant vibration diagnosis on the HIT inter-shaft bearing benchmark. Six synchronous vibration channels are segmented into fixed-length windows, standardized using source-domain statistics, and classified by a compact 1D CNN backbone with and without squeeze-and-excitation (SE) channel attention. A deeper ResNet1D baseline is further introduced to examine whether increasing backbone capacity improves cross-bearing generalization under the same source-only training protocol. We compare random segment-level splits with bearing-level cross-splits that hold out entire bearings as unseen target domains, and we report deployment-oriented indicators including balanced accuracy, false-alarm rate (FAR), and miss rate over five random seeds. Under random splits, the compact CNN baseline reaches near-ceiling test accuracy, confirming that the benchmark is readily separable under in-domain interpolation. In contrast, cross-bearing evaluation reveals severe degradation: in the representative split, the baseline CNN accuracy collapses to approximately 15% with near-zero normal-class recall, while ResNet1D improves fault sensitivity but still retains a high FAR above 88%. Additional cross-bearing permutations further show that this degradation is not attributable to a single unfavorable source–target split. These findings indicate that, under the tested source-only backbones and protocols, distribution mismatch is a dominant bottleneck for deployment-ready cross-bearing diagnosis. The results establish a reproducible baseline for protocol-driven evaluation in aero-engine PHM and motivate future work on domain adaptation, domain generalization, calibration, and sequential decision logic.