Fault diagnosis is vital in manufacturing system, since early detections on the emerging problem can save invaluable time and cost. With the development of smart manufacturing, the data-driven fault diagnosis becomes a hot topic. However, the traditional data-driven fault diagnosis methods rely on the features extracted by experts. The feature extraction process is an exhausted work and greatly impacts the final result. Deep learning (DL) provides an effective way to extract the features of raw data automatically. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is an effective DL method. In this study, a new CNN based on LeNet-5 is proposed for fault diagnosis. Through a conversion method converting signals into two-dimensional (2-D) images, the proposed method can extract the features of the converted 2-D images and eliminate the effect of handcrafted features. The proposed method which is tested on three famous datasets, including motor bearing dataset, self-priming centrifugal pump dataset, and axial piston hydraulic pump dataset, has achieved prediction accuracy of 99.79%, 99.481%, and 100%, respectively. The results have been compared with other DL and traditional methods, including adaptive deep CNN, sparse filter, deep belief network, and support vector machine. The comparisons show that the proposed CNN-based data-driven fault diagnosis method has achieved significant improvements.

Fault diagnosis plays an important role in modern industry. With the development of smart manufacturing, the data-driven fault diagnosis becomes hot. However, traditional methods have two shortcomings: 1) their performances depend on the good design of handcrafted features of data, but it is difficult to predesign these features and 2) they work well under a general assumption: the training data and testing data should be drawn from the same distribution, but this assumption fails in many engineering applications. Since deep learning (DL) can extract the hierarchical representation features of raw data, and transfer learning provides a good way to perform a learning task on the different but related distribution datasets, deep transfer learning (DTL) has been developed for fault diagnosis. In this paper, a new DTL method is proposed. It uses a three-layer sparse auto-encoder to extract the features of raw data, and applies the maximum mean discrepancy term to minimizing the discrepancy penalty between the features from training data and testing data. The proposed DTL is tested on the famous motor bearing dataset from the Case Western Reserve University. The results show a good improvement, and DTL achieves higher prediction accuracies on most experiments than DL. The prediction accuracy of DTL, which is as high as 99.82%, is better than the results of other algorithms, including deep belief network, sparse filter, artificial neural network, support vector machine and some other traditional methods. What is more, two additional analytical experiments are conducted. The results show that a good unlabeled third dataset may be helpful to DTL, and a good linear relationship between the final prediction accuracies and their standard deviations have been observed.