The field of mechanical fault diagnosis has entered the era of “big data”. However, existing diagnostic algorithms, relying on artificial feature extraction and expert knowledge are of poor extraction ability and lack self-adaptability in the mass data. In the fault diagnosis of rotating machinery, due to the accidental occurrence of equipment faults, the proportion of fault samples is small, the samples are imbalanced, and available data are scarce, which leads to the low accuracy rate of the intelligent diagnosis model trained to identify the equipment state. To solve the above problems, an end-to-end diagnosis model is first proposed, which is an intelligent fault diagnosis method based on one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN). That is to say, the original vibration signal is directly input into the model for identification. After that, through combining the convolutional neural network with the generative adversarial networks, a data expansion method based on the one-dimensional deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (1D-DCGAN) is constructed to generate small sample size fault samples and construct the balanced data set. Meanwhile, in order to solve the problem that the network is difficult to optimize, gradient penalty and Wasserstein distance are introduced. Through the test of bearing database and hydraulic pump, it shows that the one-dimensional convolution operation has strong feature extraction ability for vibration signals. The proposed method is very accurate for fault diagnosis of the two kinds of equipment, and high-quality expansion of the original data can be achieved.

A novel fault diagnosis method is proposed, depending on a cloud service, for the typical faults in the hydraulic directional valve. The method, based on the Machine Learning Service (MLS) HUAWEI CLOUD, achieves accurate diagnosis of hydraulic valve faults by combining both the advantages of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in dimensionality reduction and the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm. First, to obtain the principal component feature set of the pressure signal, PCA was utilized to reduce the dimension of the measured inlet and outlet pressure signals of the hydraulic directional valve. Second, a machine learning sample was constructed by replacing the original fault set with the principal component feature set. Third, the MLS was employed to create an XGBoost model to diagnose valve faults. Lastly, based on model evaluation indicators such as precision, the recall rate, and the F1 score, a test set was used to compare the XGBoost model with the Classification And Regression Trees (CART) model and the Random Forests (RFs) model, respectively. The research results indicate that the proposed method can effectively identify valve faults in the hydraulic directional valve and have higher fault diagnosis accuracy.

Predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of mechanical equipment can improve production efficiency while effectively reducing the life cycle cost and failure rate. This paper proposes a method for predicting the remaining service life of equipment through a combination of a deep convolutional autoencoder (DCAE) and a convolutional neural network (CNN). For rolling bearings, a health indicator (HI) could be built by combining DCAE and self-organizing map (SOM) networks, performing more advanced characterization against the original vibration data and modeling the degradation state of the rolling bearings. The HI serves as the label of the original vibration data, and the original data with such label is input into the prediction model of the RUL based on a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN). The model was trained for predicting the RUL of a rolling bearing. The bearing degradation dataset was evaluated to verify the method’s effectiveness. The results demonstrate that the constructed HI can characterize the bearing degradation state effectively and that the method of predicting the RUL can accurately predict the bearing degradation trend.

To address the problem that the faults in axial piston pumps are complex and difficult to effectively diagnose, an integrated hydraulic pump fault diagnosis method based on the modified ensemble empirical mode decomposition (MEEMD), autoregressive (AR) spectrum energy, and wavelet kernel extreme learning machine (WKELM) methods is presented in this paper. First, the non-linear and non-stationary hydraulic pump vibration signals are decomposed into several intrinsic mode function (IMF) components by the MEEMD method. Next, AR spectrum analysis is performed for each IMF component, in order to extract the AR spectrum energy of each component as fault characteristics. Then, a hydraulic pump fault diagnosis model based on WKELM is built, in order to extract the features and diagnose faults of hydraulic pump vibration signals, for which the recognition accuracy reached 100%. Finally, the fault diagnosis effect of the hydraulic pump fault diagnosis method proposed in this paper is compared with BP neural network, support vector machine (SVM), and extreme learning machine (ELM) methods. The hydraulic pump fault diagnosis method presented in this paper can diagnose faults of single slipper wear, single slipper loosing and center spring wear type with 100% accuracy, and the fault diagnosis time is only 0.002 s. The results demonstrate that the integrated hydraulic pump fault diagnosis method based on MEEMD, AR spectrum, and WKELM methods has higher fault recognition accuracy and faster speed than existing alternatives.

Aiming at addressing the problem that the faults in axial piston pumps are complex and difficult to effectively diagnose, an axial piston pump fault diagnosis method that is based on the combination of Mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) and the extreme learning machine (ELM) is proposed. Firstly, a sound sensor is used to realize contactless sound signal acquisition of the axial piston pump. The wavelet packet default threshold denoises the original acquired sound signals. Afterwards, windowing and framing are added to the de-noised sound signals. The MFCC voiceprint characteristics of the processed sound signals are extracted. The voiceprint characteristics are divided into a training sample set and test sample set. ELM models with different numbers of neurons in the hidden layers are established for training and testing. The relationship between the number of neurons in the hidden layer and the recognition accuracy rate is obtained. The ELM model with the optimal number of hidden layer neurons is established and trained with the training sample set. The trained ELM model is applied to the test sample set for fault diagnosis. The fault diagnosis results are obtained. The fault diagnosis results of the ELM model are compared with those of the back propagation (BP) neural network and the support vector machine. The results show that the fault diagnosis method that is proposed in this paper has a higher recognition accuracy rate, shorter training and diagnosis times, and better application prospect.

In the metallurgical industry, hydraulic automatic gauge control (HAGC) is a core mechanism for thickness control of plates used in the rolling process. The stability of the HAGC system’s kernel position closed-loop is key to ensuring a process with high precision, speed and reliability. However, the closed-loop position control system is typically nonlinear, and its stability is affected by several factors, making it difficult to analyze instability in the system. This paper describes in detail the functioning of the position closed-loop system. A mathematical model of each component was established using theoretical analysis. An incremental transfer model of the position closed-loop system was also derived by studying the connections between each component. In addition, based on the derived information transfer relationship, a transfer block diagram of disturbance quantity of the system was established. Furthermore, the Popov frequency criterion method was introduced to ascertain its absolute stability. The results indicate that the absolute stability conditions of the position closed-loop system are derived in two situations: when spool displacement is positive or negative. This study lays a theoretical foundation for research on the instability mechanism of an HAGC system.