Fault diagnosis of planetary gears based on intrinsic feature extraction and deep transfer learning
Huan Li, Yong Lv, Rui Yuan, Zhang Dang, Zhixin Cai, Bingnan An
Abstract
Abstract The planetary gearbox is a key transmission apparatus used to change speed and torque. The planetary gear is one of the most failure-prone components in a planetary gearbox. Due to the complexity of working environments, collected vibration signals contain a lot of noise and interference; fault characteristic frequencies are usually submerged or even lost. Thus, feature extraction from the vibration signal is beneficial to subsequent fault diagnosis. As a fault identification approach that has been increasingly popular in the field of fault diagnosis, deep learning requires a large number of samples to train the model. Insufficient samples lead to low diagnostic accuracy for deep learning models. This paper proposes a novel fault diagnosis approach for planetary gears based on intrinsic feature extraction and deep transfer learning. The original vibration signals are decomposed into a series of band-limited intrinsic mode functions (BLIMFs) by variational mode decomposition. BLIMF with the most apparent fault characteristics is selected to generate two-dimensional time-frequency maps by continuous wavelet transform. The preprocessed time-frequency maps are adopted as the input of the pretrained VGG16 model. The bottom layers are frozen, and the top layers are fine-tuned to achieve fault diagnosis for planetary gears. Applications to planetary gear datasets verify the superiority of the proposed method.