Gearbox fault diagnosis using improved feature representation and multitask learning

Abstract

A gearbox is a critical rotating component that is used to transmit torque from one shaft to another. This paper presents a data-driven gearbox fault diagnosis system in which the issue of variable working conditions namely uneven speed and the load of the machinery is addressed. Moreover, a mechanism is suggested that how an improved feature extraction process and data from multiple tasks can contribute to the overall performance of a fault diagnosis model. The variable working conditions make a gearbox fault diagnosis a challenging task. The performance of the existing algorithms in the literature deteriorates under variable working conditions. In this paper, a refined feature extraction technique and multitask learning are adopted to address this variability issue. The feature extraction step helps to explore unique fault signatures which are helpful to perform gearbox fault diagnosis under uneven speed and load conditions. Later, these extracted features are provided to a convolutional neural network (CNN) based multitask learning (MTL) network to identify the faults in the provided gearbox dataset. A comparison of the experimental results of the proposed model with that of several already published state-of-the-art diagnostic techniques suggests the superiority of the proposed model under uneven speed and load conditions. Therefore, based on the results the proposed approach can be used for gearbox fault diagnosis under uneven speed and load conditions.