PALC-Net: A Partial Convolution Attention-Enhanced CNN-LSTM Network for Aircraft Engine Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction for aeroengines represents a core challenge in Prognostics and Health Management (PHM), with significant implications for condition-based maintenance, operational cost reduction, and flight safety enhancement. Current deep learning-based approaches encounter three major limitations when handling multi-source sensor data: conventional convolution operations struggle to model heterogeneous sensor feature distributions, leading to computational redundancy; simplistic multimodal fusion strategies often induce semantic conflicts; and high model complexity hinders industrial deployment. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Partial Convolution Attention-enhanced CNN-LSTM Network (PALC-Net). We introduce a partial convolution mechanism that applies convolution to only half of the input channels while preserving identity mappings for the remainder. This design retains representational power while substantially lowering computational overhead. A dual-branch feature extraction architecture is developed: the temporal branch employs a PConv-CNN-LSTM architecture to capture spatio-temporal dependencies, while the statistical branch utilizes multi-scale sliding windows to extract physical degradation indicators—such as mean, standard deviation, and trend. Additionally, an adaptive fusion module based on cross-attention is designed, where heterogeneous features are projected into a unified semantic space via Query-Key-Value mappings. A sigmoid gating mechanism is incorporated to enable dynamic weight allocation, effectively mitigating inter-modal conflicts. Extensive experiments on the NASA C-MAPSS dataset demonstrate that PALC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance across all four subsets. Notably, on the FD003 subset, it attains an MAE of 7.70 and an R² of 0.9147, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness and synergistic contributions of the partial convolution, attention mechanism, and multimodal fusion modules. This work offers an accurate and efficient solution for aeroengine RUL prediction, achieving an effective balance between engineering practicality and algorithmic sophistication.