An Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Scheme Using Transferred Samples for Intershaft Bearings Under Variable Working Conditions

Deep convolution domain-adversarial transfer learning for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings

In practical industrial scenarios, mechanical equipment frequently operates within dynamic working conditions. To address the challenge posed by the incongruent data distribution between source and target domains amidst varying operational contexts, particularly in the absence of labels within the target domain, this study presents a solution involving deep feature construction and an unsupervised domain adaptation strategy for rolling bearing fault diagnosis across varying working conditions. The proposed methodology commences by subjecting the original vibration signal of the bearing to a fast Fourier transform (FFT) to extract spectral information. Subsequently, an innovative amalgamation of a one-dimensional convolutional layer and an auto-encoder were introduced to construct a convolutional auto-encoder (CAE) dedicated to acquiring depth features from the spectrum. In a subsequent step, leveraging the depth features gleaned from the convolutional auto-encoder, a balanced distribution adaptation (BDA) mechanism was introduced to facilitate the domain adaptation of features from both the source and target domains. The culminating stage entails the classification of adapted features using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm to attain cross-domain diagnosis. Empirical evaluations are conducted on two extensively used datasets. The findings substantiate that the proposed approach is capable of accomplishing the cross-domain fault diagnosis task even without labeled data within the target domain. Furthermore, the diagnostic accuracy and stability of the proposed method surpass those of various other migration and deep learning approaches.

The successful application of traditional machine learning to mechanical fault diagnosis relies on two conditions: the same probability distribution of training data and testing data, and the data containing fault information has labels. However, it is difficult to obtain massive labeled data, and the change of mechanical operation conditions also results in inconsistent distribution of source domain data and target domain data, which makes the labeled data for training model possibly fail in classifying unlabeled data acquired under other conditions. Aiming at solving the above problems, a deep convolution variational autoencoder network is introduced, the pseudo-label information of small samples in target domain is predicted by using label propagation and data fusion methods, combining with the domain adaptability advantages of transfer learning theory, a novel diagnosis method based on transfer learning with deep convolution variational autoencoder (TL-DCVAEN) is presented. In addition, the spectrum data is used as the input of the model to reduce the dependence on artificial feature design and engineering experience. The experimental results indicate that the proposed diagnosis method is suitable for rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable working conditions, and has better diagnostic performance and generalization.

Intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) based on deep learning can achieve high accuracy from raw condition monitoring signals. However, models usually perform well on the training distribution only, and experience severe performance drops when applied to a different distribution. This is also observed in fault diagnosis, where assets are often operated in working conditions different from the ones in which the labeled data have been collected. The scenario where labeled data are available in a source domain and only unlabeled data are available in a target domain has been addressed recently by unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches for IFD. Recent methods have relied on self-training with confident pseudo-labels for the unlabeled target samples. However, the confidence-based selection of pseudo-labels is hindered by poorly calibrated uncertainty estimates in the target domain, primarily due to over-confident predictions, which limits the quality of pseudo-labels and leads to error accumulation. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Calibrated Adaptive Teacher (CAT), where we propose to calibrate the predictions of the teacher network on target samples throughout the self-training process, leveraging post hoc calibration techniques. We evaluate CAT on domain-adaptive IFD and perform extensive experiments on the Paderborn University (PU) benchmark for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings under varying operating conditions, using both time- and frequency-domain inputs. We compare four different calibration techniques within our framework, where temperature scaling is both the most effective and lightweight one. The resulting method—CAT+TempScaling—achieves state-of-the-art performance on most transfer tasks, with on average 7.5% higher accuracy and 4 times lower calibration error compared to domain-adversarial neural networks (DANNs) across the twelve PU transfer tasks.

Rolling bearings are the core components of ship rotating mechanism, and accurate fault diagnosis has great significance in preventing serious failures of them and performing effective maintenance strategy during navigation. However, varying working conditions and cabin noisy environment would affect the monitored signals of bearings, resulting in the degradation of diagnosis performance. To address this problem, a new fault diagnosis method combining the Denoising Convolutional Auto-Encoder (DCAE) and the multi-scale Residual Net (MSRNet) is proposed in this paper. The DCAE model is designed for denoising. The fully-connected layers of Denoising Auto-Encoder (DAE) are replaced with one-dimensional convolutional layers. In the MSRNet, multiple-size convolutional kernels are utilized in each residual block for extracting multi-scale features of the signals. Typical bearing failure dataset is used for validation. The experimental results show superior performance on noise resistance and domain adaptation of the proposed method under noisy environments and varying working conditions.

With the development of deep learning methods, the data-driven fault diagnosis methods have attracted a great deal of interest. However, as for the data-driven fault diagnosis methods, technology has to overcome various difficulties in the practical industrial scenarios, such as variable working conditions, insufficient effective samples, and environmental noise interference. Combining with the time–frequency analysis of vibration signals, a domain adaptation fault diagnosis model based on ResNet and Transformer (DAFDMRT) is proposed in this work, aiming to solve the problems encountered by current rotating machinery fault diagnosis methods in the field of application. Firstly, the vibration signal is processed by wavelet packet transform and the time–frequency information grayscale maps is constructed. Next, a deep fusion feature extraction network combining ResNet and Transformer encoder, is designed for the extraction and fusion of the local and global features of multi-scale time–frequency information. Finally, the multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy is applied to measure and minimize the distribution difference between the deep features of source and target domain, thereby improving the diagnostic performance of the diagnosis model in variable working conditions. In this work, comparative experiments are conducted as for bearing and gearbox datasets under variable working conditions. The results indicate that DAFDMRT can show excellent performances in terms of fault diagnosis and generalization ability.

An intelligent fault diagnosis model based on deep neural network for few-shot fault diagnosis

To realize accurate fault diagnosis of rolling bearing under random noise, a novel fault diagnosis method based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and optimized Elman_AdaBoost is proposed in this paper. First, the EEMD method is used to decompose the original vibration signal into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Then, the correlation coefficient and kurtosis of IMFs are used to remove any excess ingredients, and the signal is reconstructed by using the rest of IMFs. In addition, based on the analysis of the time–frequency characteristics of the reconstructed signal, the root-mean-square value and the power spectrum center are extracted as a 2-D feature vector from each reconstructed signal and regarded as the input characteristic vector of the Elman neural network. Combined with the AdaBoost classification algorithm, the Elman_AdaBoost algorithm is improved and proposed to establish the strong classifier. Finally, based on the vibration data recorded in the bearing center of the Case Western Reserve University, three kinds of bearings with different faults and normal bearings are selected as the sample data and the training samples and test samples are constructed. Experimental results show that the proposed EEMD method and optimized Elman_AdaBoost model can effectively diagnose the rolling bearing under random noise, and has the advantages of fast speed, small error, and stable performance. Comparing with the traditional Elman_AdaBoost and single Elman neural network algorithm, this paper with fewer characteristics can get better accuracy and real-time processing performance, and presents a simple and practical resolution for the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings.

To address the issues of negative transfer and reduced stability in transfer learning models for rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable working conditions, an unsupervised multi-adversarial transfer learning fault diagnosis algorithm based on bearing dynamics simulation data is proposed. Firstly, the algorithm constructs both a global domain classifier and a subdomain classifier. In the subdomain classifier, the simulated vibration signal, which contains rich bearing fault label information, is generated by constructing dynamic equations to replace the label prediction of target domain data, thereby achieving alignment of marginal and conditional distributions. Simultaneously, an improved loss function with embedded maximum mean discrepancy is designed to reduce the feature distribution gap between source and target domain data. Finally, a weight allocation mechanism for source domain and simulation domain samples is developed to promote positive transfer and suppress negative transfer. Experiments were conducted using the Paderborn University dataset and the Huazhong University of Science and Technology dataset, achieving accuracy rates of 89.457% and 96.436%, respectively. The results show that, in comparison with existing unsupervised cross-domain fault diagnosis methods, the proposed method demonstrates significant improvements in diagnostic accuracy and stability, demonstrating its superiority in rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable operational conditions.

Bearing is a key component of rotating machinery, thus the accurate and efficient fault diagnosis of bearing is critical to the safety and reliability of rotating machinery systems. In recent years, the intelligent fault diagnosis technology of bearing represented by deep learning has made rapid development. However, the stability and generalization performance of the fault diagnosis model of bearing under complex environmental noise and variable working conditions is not good. Fortunately, self-supervised learning represented by contrastive learning can provide a good solution. The current research on contrastive learning mainly focuses on self-supervised contrastive learning, but the lack of supervised learning of fault label information leads to the reduction of diagnostic accuracy and robustness under variable working conditions. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a supervised contrastive learning combined with multi-scale attention mechanism for fault diagnosis of bearing under variable operating conditions. Firstly, the preprocessing of bearing time-domain vibration data is completed, including data set division, data augmentation, and construction of “positive” or “negative” pairs for comparative learning. Then, a supervised learning network integrating multi-scale attention mechanism is constructed to complete bearing fault feature extraction. Finally, the model transfer fault diagnosis is completed under complex noise and variable working conditions. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through a large number of noise and variable-condition experiments. The results show that the proposed method has high fault classification accuracy and robustness under the influence of complex noise and variable working conditions.

Deep continual transfer learning with dynamic weight aggregation for fault diagnosis of industrial streaming data under varying working conditions

Self-supervised feature extraction via time–frequency contrast for intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Bearing is one of the core components of any rotating machine, and its failure is widespread. This reason drives continuous monitoring and detecting bearing faults during machine operation to warn operators and prevent unforeseen damage. This paper proposes an intelligent Passive Thermography (PTG) based fault diagnosis technique for detection of bearing faults using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Transfer Learning (TL) under varying working conditions. The validation of the proposed method has been done on three different datasets; bearing test rig dataset has been taken as a source domain data while Induction Motor (IM), and Machine Fault Simulator (MFS) datasets have been taken as target domain data. The proposed method enables and speeds up the training process of CNN towards accurate adaptation for fault diagnosis approach in the escalated time frame. The experimental results demonstrated that the suggested approach could successfully learn transferable characteristics from the source domain model, which can cope with the issue of limited availability of training data required for the target domain. The classification accuracy on the target domain dataset were varied in the range of 89 -95.4 % in the case of the IM dataset and 96.5-97.5% in the case of the MFS dataset. Moreover, it shows the benefits of the suggested method, which may be utilized as an effective non-invasive diagnostic tool for rotating machines to avoid unexpected system shutdowns.

Fault diagnosis plays a critical role in ensuring the safe operation of machinery. Multi-source domain adaptation (DA) leverages rich fault knowledge from source domains to enhance diagnostic performance on unlabeled target domains. However, most existing methods only align marginal distributions, neglecting inter-class relationships, which results in decreased performance under variable working conditions and small samples. To overcome these limitations, two stage multi-source domain adaptation (TSMDA) has been proposed for bearing fault diagnosis. Specifically, wavelet packet decomposition is applied to analyze fault information from signals. For small sample datasets, Diffusion is used to augment the dataset and serve as the source domain. Next, multi-scale features are extracted, and mutual information is computed to prevent the negative transfer. DA is divided into two stages. Firstly, multikernel maximum mean discrepancy is used to align the marginal distributions of the multi-source and target domains. Secondly, the target domain is split into subdomains based on the calculated pseudo-labels. Conditional distributions are aligned by minimizing the distance from samples to the center of the non-corresponding domain. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by extensive experiments on two public datasets and one experimental dataset. The results demonstrate that TSMDA has high and stable diagnostic performance and provides an effective method for practical fault diagnosis.

Fault diagnosis plays a very important role in ensuring the safe and reliable operations of machines. Currently, the deep learning-based fault diagnosis is attracting increasing attention. However, fault diagnosis under variable working conditions has been a significant challenge due to the domain discrepancy problem. This problem is also unavoidable in deep learning-based fault diagnosis methods. This paper contributes to the ongoing investigation by proposing a new approach for the fault diagnosis under variable working conditions based on STFT and transfer deep residual network (TDRN). The STFT was employed to convert vibration signal to time-frequency image as the input of the TDRN. To address the domain discrepancy problem, the TDRN was developed in this paper. Unlike traditional deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) methods, by combining with transfer learning, the TDRN can make a bridge between two different working conditions, thereby using the knowledge learned from a working condition to achieve a high classification accuracy in another working condition. Moreover, since the residual learning is introducing, the TDRN can overcome the problems of training difficulty and performance degradation existing in traditional DCNN methods, thus further improving the classification accuracy. Experiments are conducted on the popular CWRU bearing dataset to validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. The results show that the developed TDRN outperforms those methods without transfer learning and/or residual learning in terms of the accuracy and feature learning ability for the fault diagnosis under variable working conditions.