Synthetic Data Augmentation and Deep Learning for the Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machines

Abstract

As failures in rotating machines can have serious implications, the timely detection and diagnosis of faults in these machines is imperative for their smooth and safe operation. Although deep learning offers the advantage of autonomously learning the fault characteristics from the data, the data scarcity from different health states often limits its applicability to only binary classification (healthy or faulty). This work proposes synthetic data augmentation through virtual sensors for the deep learning-based fault diagnosis of a rotating machine with 42 different classes. The original and augmented data were processed in a transfer learning framework and through a deep learning model from scratch. The two-dimensional visualization of the feature space from the original and augmented data showed that the latter’s data clusters are more distinct than the former’s. The proposed data augmentation showed a 6–15% improvement in training accuracy, a 44–49% improvement in validation accuracy, an 86–98% decline in training loss, and a 91–98% decline in validation loss. The improved generalization through data augmentation was verified by a 39–58% improvement in the test accuracy.