Vibration-based gearbox fault diagnosis using deep neural networks

Vibration-based analysis is the most commonly used technique to monitor the condition of gearboxes. Accurate classification of these vibration signals collected from gearbox is helpful for the gearbox fault diagnosis. In recent years, deep neural networks are becoming a promising tool for fault characteristic mining and intelligent diagnosis of rotating machinery with massive data. In this paper, a study of deep neural networks for fault diagnosis in gearbox is presented. Four classic deep neural networks (Auto-encoders, Restricted Boltzmann Machines, Deep Boltzmann Machines and Deep Belief Networks) are employed as the classifier to classify and identify the fault conditions of gearbox. To sufficiently validate the deep neural networks diagnosis system is highly effective and reliable, herein three types of data sets based on the health condition of two rotating mechanical systems are prepared and tested. Each signal obtained includes the information of several basic gear or bearing faults. Totally 62 data sets are used to test and train the proposed gearbox diagnosis systems. Corresponding to each vibration signal, 256 features from both time and frequency domain are selected as input parameters for deep neural networks. The accuracy achieved indicates that the presented deep neural networks are highly reliable and effective in fault diagnosis of gearbox.