SCAE—Stacked Convolutional Autoencoder for Fault Diagnosis of a Hydraulic Piston Pump with Limited Data Samples

Abstract

Deep learning (DL) models require enormous amounts of data to produce reliable diagnosis results. The superiority of DL models over traditional machine learning (ML) methods in terms of feature extraction, feature dimension reduction, and diagnosis performance has been shown in various studies of fault diagnosis systems. However, data acquisition can sometimes be compromised by sensor issues, resulting in limited data samples. In this study, we propose a novel DL model based on a stacked convolutional autoencoder (SCAE) to address the challenge of limited data. The innovation of the SCAE model lies in its ability to enhance gradient information flow and extract richer hierarchical features, leading to superior diagnostic performance even with limited and noisy data samples. This article describes the development of a fault diagnosis method for a hydraulic piston pump using time–frequency visual pattern recognition. The proposed SCAE model has been evaluated on limited data samples of a hydraulic piston pump. The findings of the experiment demonstrate that the suggested approach can achieve excellent diagnostic performance with over 99.5% accuracy. Additionally, the SCAE model has outperformed traditional DL models such as deep neural networks (DNN), standard stacked sparse autoencoders (SSAE), and convolutional neural networks (CNN) in terms of diagnosis performance. Furthermore, the proposed model demonstrates robust performance under noisy data conditions, further highlighting its effectiveness and reliability.