Data-driven intelligent diagnosis models expect to mine the health information of machines from massive monitoring data. However, the size of faulty monitoring data collected in engineering scenarios is limited, which leads to few-shot fault diagnosis as a valuable research point. Fortunately, it is possible to reduce the required amount of training data by integrating prior diagnosis knowledge into diagnosis models. Inspired by this, we present a prior knowledge-augmented self-supervised feature learning framework for few-shot fault diagnosis. In the framework, 24 signal feature indicators are built to form prior features set based on existing diagnosis knowledge. Besides, a convolutional autoencoder is used to mine the general features, which are considered to potentially contain fault information that prior features do not possess. We design a self-supervised learning scheme for training the diagnosis model, which enables the model to learn both prior and general features served as proxy labels. As a result, the model is expected to mine richer features from limited monitoring data. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified using two mechanical fault simulation experiments. From the angle of prior diagnosis knowledge, the proposed framework provides a new perspective to the problem of few-shot intelligent diagnosis of machines.

The key to intelligent fault diagnosis is to find relevant characteristics with the capability of representing different types of faults. However, the engineering problem is that a few simple empirical features (EFs) cannot obtain high classification accuracy, and complex feature engineering requires strong professional knowledge, which leads to limited applications on a general scale. In addition, intelligent feature extraction and classification methods without prior knowledge cannot guarantee that the model learned the general features used for classification, and its robustness and generalization are not strong when the objects with low-quality training data. Therefore, a fusion method of combining EFs and adaptive features extracted by a deep neural network is proposed. In this method, simple EFs that only need a few professional knowledge are adopted to realize general feature extraction and, hence, maintain the robustness of the model. A modified neural network structure (LiftingNet) is proposed to achieve the adaptive extraction of hidden features for specific objects, for realizing the high precision of bearing fault classification. In order to realize the fusing of EFs and adaptive features, XGBoost is utilized as the final classifier instead of common softmax. The feasibility and validity of the proposed method are verified by two data sets collected from motor bearings at stable work conditions. The experimental results show that the classification accuracy generated by the proposed method is improved. It also can maintain the robust performance on data sets even with various noises.

Class imbalance issue has been a major problem in mechanical fault detection, which exists when the number of instances presenting in a class is significantly fewer than that in another class. This article focuses on the problem of zero-shot fault detection of rolling bearing, which is the extreme case of class imbalance. Aiming at this problem, a two-stage zero-shot fault recognition method is proposed. First, inspired by the conditional generative adversarial network, a novel feature generating network which is composed of a feature extractor, a discriminator, and a generator is designed to capture the potential distribution of normal samples. Then, the generator will generate abundant pseudofault features by adding an additional sequence to the condition. Second, an improved deep neural network is trained with these synthetic pseudofault features as the classifier. Specially, a condition index is designed to represent different fault classes so that it can recognize the unseen fault samples. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by three datasets and a comparison method is also given to show the superiority. Results show that the feature generation network can effectively detect the typical faults even though the fault data are unavailable during training, which is practical for industrial application.

Fault diagnosis is vital to ensuring the security of rotating machinery operations. While fault data obtained from mechanical equipment for this issue are often insufficient and of no labels. In this case, supervised algorithms cannot come into play. Hence, this article proposes a self-supervised simple Siamese framework (SSF) for bearing fault diagnosis based on the contrastive learning algorithm SimSiam which uses a simplified Siamese network to find the distinguishable features of different fault categories. SSF consists of a weight-sharing encoder applied on two inputs, a nonlinear predictor and a linear classifier. SSF learns invariant characteristics of fault samples via maximizing the similarity between two views of each inputted sample. Several data augmentation (DA) methods for vibration signals, which provide different sample views for the model, are also studied, for it is crucial for contrastive learning. After fine-tuning the learned encoder and a linear layer classifier with a small subset of labeled data (1%–5% of the total samples), the network achieves satisfactory performance for bearing fault diagnosis. A series of experiments based on the data from three different scenarios are used to verify the proposed methods, getting 100%, 99.38%, and 98.87% accuracy separately.

Deep learning has demonstrated splendid performance in mechanical fault diagnosis on condition that source and target data are identically distributed. In engineering practice, however, the domain shift between source and target domains significantly limits the further application of intelligent algorithms. Despite various transfer techniques proposed, either they focus on single-source domain adaptation (SDA) or they utilize multisource domain globally or locally, which both cannot address the cross-domain diagnosis effectively, especially with category shift. To this end, we propose globally localized multisource DA for cross-domain fault diagnosis with category shift. Specifically, we construct a GlocalNet to fuse multisource information comprehensively, which consists of a feature generator and three classifiers. By optimizing the Wasserstein discrepancy of classifiers locally and accumulative higher order multisource moment globally, multisource DA is achieved from domain and class levels thus to reduce the shift on domain and category. To refine the classifier at sample level, a distilling strategy is presented. Finally, an adaptive weighting policy is employed for reliable result. To evaluate the effectiveness, the proposed method is compared with multiple methods on four bearing vibration datasets. Experimental results indicate the superiority and practicability of the proposed method for cross-domain fault diagnosis.

Playing a vital role in the safe operation of equipment, intelligent fault detection has been extensively applied in mechanical systems. However, the complicated mapping of signal symptoms and multicomponent failure modes under sharp speed variation makes it hard. The classification error is large due to insufficient samples in the fault condition. Aiming at these problems, a novel multitask redundant lifting adversarial network (MRLAN) is proposed. First, inspired by redundant second-generation wavelet transform, a reconstruction network is established to generate high-quality time-frequency representation of vibration signal, thus eliminating speed fluctuations and expanding training samples. The reconstruction network consists of transposed convolution layer, resume update layer, resume predict layer, and merge layer. Then, multitask category discriminator, which forms dual discriminator together with distance discriminator, is constructed to separate the features of multiple components, thereby realizing multiple tasks (multicomponent fault location and single-component health assessment). Finally, the model is alternately optimized through adversarial process between the generation network and the double discriminators. The proposed method is validated by two cases and other methods are also established to show its superiority. The results show satisfactory performance of MRLAN in multicomponent fault diagnosis under sharp speed fluctuation and little training data.