Hydraulic piston pump is the heart of hydraulic transmission system. On account of the limitations of traditional fault diagnosis in the dependence on expert experience knowledge and the extraction of fault features, it is of great meaning to explore the intelligent diagnosis methods of hydraulic piston pump. Motivated by deep learning theory, a novel intelligent fault diagnosis method for hydraulic piston pump is proposed via combining wavelet analysis with improved convolutional neural network (CNN). Compared with the classic AlexNet, the proposed method decreases the number of parameters and computational complexity by means of modifying the structure of network. The constructed model fully integrates the ability of wavelet analysis in feature extraction and the ability of CNN in deep learning. The proposed method is employed to extract the fault features from the measured vibration signals of the piston pump and realize the fault classification. The fault data are mainly from five different health states: central spring failure, sliding slipper wear, swash plate wear, loose slipper, and normal state, respectively. The results show that the proposed method can extract the characteristics of the vibration signals of the piston pump in multiple states, and effectively realize intelligent fault recognition. To further demonstrate the recognition property of the proposed model, different CNN models are used for comparisons, involving standard LeNet-5, improved 2D LeNet-5, and standard AlexNet. Compared with the models for contrastive analysis, the proposed method has the highest recognition accuracy, and the proposed model is more robust.

A hydraulic axial piston pump is the essential component of a hydraulic transmission system and plays a key role in modern industry. Considering varying working conditions and the implicity of frequent faults, it is difficult to accurately monitor the machinery faults in the actual operating process by using current fault diagnosis methods. Hence, it is urgent and significant to investigate effective and precise fault diagnosis approaches for pumps. Owing to the advantages of intelligent fault diagnosis methods in big data processing, methods based on deep learning have accomplished admirable performance for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. The prevailing convolutional neural network (CNN) displays desirable automatic learning ability. Therefore, an integrated intelligent fault diagnosis method is proposed based on CNN and continuous wavelet transform (CWT), combining the feature extraction and classification. Firstly, CWT is used to convert the raw vibration signals into time-frequency representations and achieve the extraction of image features. Secondly, a new framework of deep CNN is established via designing the convolutional layers and sub-sampling layers. The learning process and results are visualized by t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). The results of the experiment present a higher classification accuracy compared with other models. It is demonstrated that the proposed approach is effective and stable for fault diagnosis of a hydraulic axial piston pump.

As a critical part of a hydraulic transmission system, a hydraulic axial piston pump plays an indispensable role in many significant industrial fields. Owing to the practical undesirable working environment and hidden faults, it is challenging to precisely and effectively detect and diagnose the varying fault in the engineering. Deep learning-based technology presents special strengths in processing mechanical big data. It can simultaneously complete the feature extraction and classification, and achieve the automatic information learning. The popular convolutional neural network (CNN) is exploited for its potent ability of image processing. In this paper, a novel combined intelligent method is developed for fault diagnosis towards a hydraulic axial piston pump. First, the conversion of signals to images is conducted via continuous wavelet transform; the effective feature is preliminarily extracted from the transformed time-frequency images. Second, a novel deep CNN model is constructed to achieve the fault classification. To disclose the potential learning in the disparate layers of the CNN model, the visualization of reduced features is performed by employing t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding. The effectiveness and stability of the proposed model are validated through the experiments. With the proposed method, different fault types can be precisely identified and high classification accuracy is achieved in a hydraulic axial piston pump.