This paper deals with gear pitting fault diagnosis problem and presents a method by integrating convolutional neural network (CNN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks with vibration and acoustic emission signals to solve the problem. The presented method first trains a one-dimensional CNN with acoustic emission signals and a GRU network with vibration signals. Then the gear pitting fault features obtained by the two networks are concatenated to form a deep learning structure for gear pitting fault diagnosis. Seven different gear pitting conditions are used to test the feasibility of the presented method. The diagnosis result of the gear pitting fault shows that the accuracy of the presented method reaches above 98% with only a relatively small number of training samples. In comparison with the results using CNN or GRU network alone, the presented method gives more accurate diagnosis results. By comparing the results of different loads and learning rates, the robustness of the presented method for gear pitting fault diagnosis is proved. Moreover, the presented deep structure can be easily extended to more other sensor input signals for gear pitting fault diagnosis in the future.

Early fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is crucial in the industry. The network parameters of the traditional deep learning-based fault diagnosis method are optimized only by the single loss function, and the extracted features are usually not the most valuable features of the input signal. This article proposes a novel method, attention recurrent autoencoder (AE) hybrid model classification algorithm, for early fault diagnosis and severity detection of rotating machinery. The AE can learn the most valuable features in an unsupervised way. By adjusting the weight proportion of the two loss functions and optimizing the multibranch network simultaneously, the proposed method enables the network to extract the most valuable features of the input signals. Moreover, the proposed method can take the raw 1-D vibration signal as the input and does not need time-frequency conversion. By introducing long short-term memory networks in AE, the time-dependent features of the data can be extracted effectively. The proposed method was verified by five kinds of gears at different pitting degrees under six load conditions. The results indicate that the method can provide simultaneous accurate fault diagnosis and severity detection for different pitting degrees.

Research on data-driven fault diagnosis methods has received much attention in recent years. The deep belief network (DBN) is a commonly used deep learning method for fault diagnosis. In the past, when people used DBN to diagnose gear pitting faults, it was found that the diagnosis result was not good with continuous time domain vibration signals as direct inputs into DBN. Therefore, most researchers extracted features from time domain vibration signals as inputs into DBN. However, it is desirable to use raw vibration signals as direct inputs to achieve good fault diagnosis results. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel method by stacking spare autoencoder (SAE) and Gauss-Binary restricted Boltzmann machine (GBRBM) for early gear pitting faults diagnosis with raw vibration signals as direct inputs. The SAE layer is used to compress the raw vibration data and the GBRBM layer is used to effectively process continuous time domain vibration signals. Vibration signals of seven early gear pitting faults collected from a gear test rig are used to validate the proposed method. The validation results show that the proposed method maintains a good diagnosis performance under different working conditions and gives higher diagnosis accuracy compared to other traditional methods.

In recent years, research on gear pitting fault diagnosis has been conducted. Most of the research has focused on feature extraction and feature selection process, and diagnostic models are only suitable for one working condition. To diagnose early gear pitting faults under multiple working conditions, this article proposes to develop a domain adaptation diagnostic model–based improved deep neural network and transfer learning with raw vibration signals. A particle swarm optimization algorithm and L2 regularization are used to optimize the improved deep neural network to improve the stability and accuracy of the diagnosis. When using the domain adaptation diagnostic model for fault diagnosis, it is necessary to discriminate whether the target domain (test data) is the same as the source domain (training data). If the target domain and the source domain are consistent, the trained improved deep neural network can be used directly for diagnosis. Otherwise, the transfer learning is combined with improved deep neural network to develop a deep transfer learning network to improve the domain adaptability of the diagnostic model. Vibration signals for seven gear types with early pitting faults under 25 working conditions collected from a gear test rig are used to validate the proposed method. It is confirmed by the validation results that the developed domain adaptation diagnostic model has a significant improvement in the adaptability of multiple working conditions.

Pitting corrosion of rotating machinery is one of the most common faults in industrial engineering. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is increasingly applied to the fault diagnosis. However, the conventional CNN method will reduce the feature dimension of the collected signal and cause the loss of information during the pooling process. In this paper, a new method based on dilated CNN combined with spatial dropout (DCSD) is proposed to diagnose the early faults of rotating machinery. By filling the convolution kernel, the DCSD method can increase the receptive field of the CNN without increasing the number of parameters while retaining more features of the raw vibration signal of the rotating machine. To avoid the dropout method eliminates the adjacent elements with a strong correlation, the Spatial Dropout method is adopted to reduce the overfitting problem of deep networks. The early pitting gears experiment was designed to verify the DCSD method in this paper. The raw vibration signal data of 6 different healthy states were collected to verify the effectiveness of the method. The experimental results show that the DCSD method proposed can effectively distinguish the different early gears pitting, and the diagnostic accuracy is better than other popular deep learning methods.