Rolling Bearing Dynamics Simulation Information-Assisted Fault Diagnosis with Multi-Adversarial Domain Transfer Learning

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.

A Tensor-based domain alignment method for intelligent fault diagnosis of rolling bearing in rotating machinery

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.

The concept of Industry 4.0 uses cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things to create "smart factories" that enable automated and connected production. However, the complex and diverse nature of cyber-physical systems makes them vulnerable to physical threats, where any fault in their physical components can lead to serious consequences, from financial losses to human safety. To reduce the risk of such failures, it is essential to have techniques in place to monitor the condition of these physical components closely. In recent years, data-driven predictive maintenance methods have become common due to the growth in data and advancements in machine learning. This thesis focuses on fault diagnosis, a key part of predictive maintenance, which aims to detect and identify faults in physical components. Incorporating advanced techniques, including machine learning algorithms and sensor data analysis, enhanced fault diagnosis systems' accuracy and efficiency. However, several real-world barriers challenge the effectiveness of these techniques. This research is structured around three primary objectives. The first objective aims to establish an efficient fault diagnosis system that is highly sensitive to fault occurrences while being resilient to uncertainties such as variability in fault patterns and data imbalance. To address variability in fault patterns, we developed a multi-step approach integrating clustering techniques and an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, which significantly improved diagnosis robustness even under noisy conditions. For imbalanced datasets, a two-step method was introduced, combining permutation entropy for fault detection and envelope analysis for fault isolation. This approach was enhanced by an automatic frequency band selection method leveraging wavelet transform and statistical criteria, resulting in high fault diagnosis accuracy and reliability, even with limited labeled faulty data. The second objective focuses on developing fault diagnosis systems that can maintain high performance despite domain shifts and limited training data in both source and target domains. To address the challenge of domain shifts, a transfer learning technique was introduced, and a systematic literature review was conducted. This study bridges a technical gap by providing a comprehensive taxonomy, state-of-the-art methods, and insights into the challenges of applying transfer learning to predictive maintenance. Additionally, a conceptual framework was proposed to explore scenarios for transferring diagnostic knowledge from different source domains to target domains with insufficient training datasets. In a subsequent study, a new diagnostic framework was developed using digital twins and partial transfer learning to address the lack of real training datasets in both source and target domains as well as label space inconsistencies between them. The framework includes a general approach for developing digital twins of real machines to generate synthetic diagnostic data as source domain data. Furthermore, by incorporating a deep learning network and a double-layer attention mechanism, a partial transfer learning diagnostic model was developed to transfer diagnostic knowledge from the digital twin to the real target domain despite label space inconsistencies. The proposed framework was validated through an industrial case study involving rolling bearings in rotating equipment. The third objective focuses on developing an efficient fault diagnosis system capable of maintaining reliability under unseen and evolving working conditions. To achieve this, a novel self-adaptive fault diagnosis system was proposed, incorporating the MAPE-K loop, a domain generalization network model, and digital twin technologies. This self-adaptive fault diagnosis system leverages the MAPE-K loop to adapt in real time to evolving working conditions. Digital twins were employed to continuously generate data aligned with the real system’s operational context, enabling accurate fault diagnosis in dynamic environments. The domain generalization network model enhances generalization to unseen target working conditions by addressing overfitting and feature loss through multi-domain data augmentation, adversarial learning, and domain discrepancy modules. Validation using multiple rotating machinery datasets demonstrated that the developed fault diagnosis system outperformed state-of-the-art methods across various scenarios. In summary, this dissertation proposes a comprehensive and practical approach to addressing variability in fault patterns, imbalance datasets, data scarcity, domain shifts, and unseen and evolving working conditions challenges in existing fault diagnosis systems.

Recent progress in machine learning has been mainly due to the availability of large amounts of annotated data used for training complex models with deep architectures. Annotating this training data becomes burdensome and creates a major bottleneck in maintaining machine-learning databases. Moreover, these trained models fail to generalize to new categories or new varieties of the same categories. This is because new categories or new varieties have data distribution different from the training data distribution. To tackle these problems, this thesis proposes to develop a family of transfer-learning techniques that can deal with different training (source) and testing (target) distributions with the assumption that the availability of annotated data is limited in the testing domain. This is done by using the auxiliary data-abundant source domain from which useful knowledge is transferred that can be applied to data-scarce target domain. This transferable knowledge serves as a prior that biases target-domain predictions and prevents the target-domain model from overfitting. Specifically, we explore structural priors that encode relational knowledge between different data entities, which provides more informative bias than traditional priors. The choice of the structural prior depends on the information availability and the similarity between the two domains. Depending on the domain similarity and the information availability, we divide the transfer learning problem into four major categories and propose different structural priors to solve each of these sub-problems. This thesis first focuses on the unsupervised-domain-adaptation problem, where we propose to minimize domain discrepancy by transforming labeled source-domain data to be close to unlabeled target-domain data. For this problem, the categories remain the same across the two domains and hence we assume that the structural relationship between the source-domain samples is carried over to the target domain. Thus, graph or hyper-graph is constructed as the structural prior from both domains and a graph/hyper-graph matching formulation is used to transform samples in the source domain to be closer to samples in the target domain. An efficient optimization scheme is then proposed to tackle the time and memory inefficiencies associated with the matching problem. The few-shot learning problem is studied next, where we propose to transfer knowledge from source-domain categories containing abundantly labeled data to novel categories in the target domain that contains only few labeled data. The knowledge transfer biases the novel category predictions and prevents the model from overfitting. The knowledge is encoded using a neural-network-based prior that transforms a data sample to its corresponding class prototype. This neural network is trained from the source-domain data and applied to the target-domain data, where it transforms the few-shot samples to the novel-class prototypes for better recognition performance. The few-shot learning problem is then extended to the situation, where we do not have access to the source-domain data but only have access to the source-domain class prototypes. In this limited information setting, parametric neural-network-based priors would overfit to the source-class prototypes and hence we seek a non-parametric-based prior using manifolds. A piecewise linear manifold is used as a structural prior to fit the source-domain-class prototypes. This structure is extended to the target domain, where the novel-class prototypes are found by projecting the few-shot samples onto the manifold. Finally, the zero-shot learning problem is addressed, which is an extreme case of the few-shot learning problem where we do not have any labeled data in the target domain. However, we have high-level information for both the source and target domain categories in the form of semantic descriptors. We learn the relation between the sample space and the semantic space, using a regularized neural network so that classification of the novel categories can be carried out in a common representation space. This same neural network is then used in the target domain to relate the two spaces. In case we want to generate data for the novel categories in the target domain, we can use a constrained generative adversarial network instead of a traditional neural network. Thus, we use structural priors like graphs, neural networks and manifolds to relate various data entities like samples, prototypes and semantics for these different transfer learning sub-problems. We explore additional post-processing steps like pseudo-labeling, domain adaptation and calibration and enforce algorithmic and architectural constraints to further improve recognition performance. Experimental results on standard transfer learning image recognition datasets produced competitive results with respect to previous work. Further experimentation and analyses of these methods provided better understanding of machine learning as well.

Machine learning methods have made great development in data-driven fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. But the intelligent fault diagnosis of intershaft bearing faces the following two dilemmas: 1) the fault vibration is extremely weak, and it is difficult to extract features that can distinguish different classes; 2) due to the complex and variable working condition, the intershaft bearing does not always fail in same working conditions. That is, the labeled training data is not sufficient for every source domain. These challenges lead to the failure of traditional machine learning based fault diagnosis for intershaft bearings. Therefore, a novel intelligent fault diagnosis scheme is investigated for intershaft bearings of dual-rotor equipment under variable working conditions. The paper focuses on two key issues: 1) developing a feature extraction approach with which the fault features with excellent clustering and separation are extracted from vibration signals. This approach addresses the dilemma of weak fault feature extraction of intershaft bearing and creates a feasible precondition for subsequent feature transfer; 2) proposing a feature transfer method transforming the labeled sample features in multiple source domains into the trainable sample features in the target domain. This new transfer achieves the sharing of labeled training samples under working conditions and enriches the trainable samples in target domain. Ultimately, the faults of intershaft bearings can be diagnosed with the help of the neural network classifier trained by the transferred samples with labels. Experimental results verify that this established scheme is effective and superior to other comparable methods for the transfer diagnosis task from multiple source domains to target domain.

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.

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.

Compared to fault diagnosis across operating conditions, the differences in data distribution between devices are more pronounced and better aligned with practical application needs. However, current research on transfer learning inadequately addresses fault diagnosis issues across devices. To better balance the relationship between computational resources and diagnostic accuracy, a knowledge distillation-based lightweight transfer learning framework for rolling bearing diagnosis is proposed in this study. Specifically, a deep teacher-student model based on variable-scale residual networks is constructed to learn domain-invariant features relevant to fault classification within both the source and target domain data. Subsequently, a knowledge distillation framework incorporating a temperature factor is established to transfer fault features learned by the large teacher model in the source domain to the smaller student model, thereby reducing computational and parameter overhead. Finally, a multi-kernel domain adaptation method is employed to capture the feature probability distribution distance of fault characteristics between the source and target domains in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), and domain-invariant features are learned by minimizing the distribution distance between them. The effectiveness and applicability of the proposed method in situations of incomplete data across device types were validated through two engineering cases, spanning device models and transitioning from laboratory equipment to real-world operational devices.

Bearing is an important component in mechanical equipment. Its main function is to support the rotating mechanical body and reduce the friction coefficient and axial load. In the actual operating environment, the bearings are affected by complex working conditions and other factors. Therefore, it is very difficult to effectively obtain data that meets the conditions of independent and identical distribution of training data and test data, which result in unsatisfactory fault diagnosis results. As a transfer learning method, joint distribution adaptive (JDA) can effectively solve the learning problem of inconsistent distribution of training data and test data. In this paper, a new bearing fault diagnosis method based on JDA and deep belief network (DBN) with improved sparrow search algorithm (CWTSSA), namely JACADN is proposed. In the JACADN, the JDA is employed to carry out feature transfer between the source domain samples and target domain samples, that is, the source domain samples and target domain samples are mapped into the same feature space by the kernel function. Then the maximum mean difference is used as the metric to reduce the joint distribution difference between the samples in the two domains. Aiming at the parameter selection of the DBN, an improved sparrow search algorithm (CWTSSA) with global optimization ability is used to optimize the parameters of the DBN in order to construct an optimized DBN model. The obtained source domain samples and target domain samples are divided into training set and test set, which are input the optimized DBN to construct a bearing fault diagnosis model for improving the diagnosis accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by vibration data of QPZZ-II rotating machinery. The experimental results show that the proposed JACADN method can effectively improve the fault diagnosis accuracy of rolling bearings under variable operating conditions.

This study aimed to find suitable source domain data in cross-domain transfer learning to extract robust image features. Then, a model was built to preoperatively distinguish lung granulomatous nodules (LGNs) from lung adenocarcinoma (LAC) in solitary pulmonary solid nodules (SPSNs). Data from 841 patients with SPSNs from five centres were collected retrospectively. First, adaptive cross-domain transfer learning was used to construct transfer learning signatures (TLS) under different source domain data and conduct a comparative analysis. The Wasserstein distance was used to assess the similarity between the source domain and target domain data in cross-domain transfer learning. Second, a cross-domain transfer learning radiomics model (TLRM) combining the best performing TLS, clinical factors and subjective CT findings was constructed. Finally, the performance of the model was validated through multicentre validation cohorts. Relative to other source domain data, TLS based on lung whole slide images as source domain data (TLS-LW) had the best performance in all validation cohorts (AUC range: 0.8228-0.8984). Meanwhile, the Wasserstein distance of TLS-LW was 1.7108, which was minimal. Finally, TLS-LW, age, spiculated sign and lobulated shape were used to build the TLRM. In all validation cohorts, The AUC ranges were 0.9074-0.9442. Compared with other models, decision curve analysis and integrated discrimination improvement showed that TLRM had better performance. The TLRM could assist physicians in preoperatively differentiating LGN from LAC in SPSNs. Furthermore, compared with other images, cross-domain transfer learning can extract robust image features when using lung whole slide images as source domain data and has a better effect.

Due to the coupling and diversity of compound fault features, it is difficult to decoupling diagnose the compound fault under small datasets and variable working conditions. To enhance the compound fault diagnosis performance, this work proposed a compound fault transfer diagnosis method that uses the multi-label transformer-based transfer learning network. Initially, the 1-D signal is converted into 2-D image using CWT as the input of the constructed deep learning network; Subsequently, a CNN-Transformer network structure is constructed, which simultaneously utilizes convolutional operation and self-attention mechanism to comprehensively capture the multi-scale fault features. In addition, multi-label classification is adopted to identify specific single fault types in the compound fault and output corresponding fault labels. Finally, a transfer learning strategy with fine-tuning mechanism is creatively integrated to achieve the compound fault transfer diagnosis, which can learn fault knowledge from single fault samples in source domain for compound fault diagnosis in required target tasks. The experimental datasets of planetary gearbox and harmonic reducer were collected in our own laboratory to validate the diagnostic performance. The results show that our proposed method achieved 98% average decoupling identification accuracy in insufficient compound fault samples on both datasets, and the accuracy fluctuation was less than 1.5% in the six transfer tasks. It is verified that the proposed method achieved excellent decoupling identification accuracy and generalization ability in small datasets and variable working conditions, which has significant advantage over the traditional local convolution-based multi-label classification methods and domain adaptation -based transfer learning methods.

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.

The multi-process manufacturing of steel rolling products requires the cooperation of complicated and variable rolling conditions. Such conditions pose challenges to the fault diagnosis of the key equipment of the rolling mill. The development of transfer learning has alleviated the problem of fault diagnosis under variable working conditions to a certain extent. However, existing diagnosis methods based on transfer learning only consider the distribution alignment from a single representation, which may only transfer part of the state knowledge and generate fuzzy decision boundaries. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-representation domain adaptation network with duplex adversarial learning for hot rolling mill fault diagnosis. First, a multi-representation network structure is designed to extract rolling mill equipment status information from multiple perspectives. Then, the domain adversarial strategy is adopted to match the source and target domains of each pair of representations for learning domain-invariant features from multiple representation networks. In addition, the maximum classifier discrepancy adversarial algorithm is adopted to generate target features that are close to the source support, thereby forming a robust decision boundary. Finally, the average value of the predicted probabilities of the two classifiers is used as the final diagnostic result. Extensive experiments are conducted on an experimental platform of a four-high hot rolling mill to collect the fault state data of the reduction gearbox and roll bearing. The experimental results reveal that the method can effectively realize the fault diagnosis of rolling mill equipment under variable working conditions and can achieve average diagnostic rates of up to 99.15% and 99.40% on the data sets of the rolling mill gearbox and bearing, which are respectively 2.19% and 1.93% higher than the rates achieved by the most competitive method.

Traditional machine learning methods rely on the training data and target data having the same feature space and data distribution. The performance may be unacceptable if there is a difference in data distribution between the training and target data, which is called cross-domain learning problem. In recent years, many domain adaptation methods have been proposed to solve this kind of problems and make much progress. However, existing domain adaptation approaches have a common assumption that the number of the data in source domain (labeled data) and target domain (unlabeled data) is matched. In this paper, the scenarios in real manufacturing site are considered, that the target domain data is much less than source domain data at the beginning, but the number of target domain data will increase as time goes by. A novel method is proposed for fault diagnosis of rolling bearing with online imbalanced cross-domain data. Finally, the proposed method which is tested on bearing dataset (CWRU) has achieved prediction accuracy of 95.89% with only 40 target samples. The results have been compared with other traditional methods. The comparisons show that the proposed online domain adaptation fault diagnosis method has achieved significant improvements. In addition, the deep transfer learning model by adaptive- network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is introduced to interpretation the results.