Accidental failures of rotating machinery components such as rolling bearings may trigger the sudden breakdown of the whole manufacturing system, thus, fault diagnosis is vital in industry to avoid these massive economical costs and casualties. Since convolutional neural networks (CNN) are poor in extracting reliable features from original signal data, the time-frequency analysis method is usually called for to transform 1D signal into a 2D time-frequency coefficient matrix in which richer information could be exposed more easily. However, realistic fault diagnosis applications face a dilemma in that signal time-frequency analysis and fault classification cannot be implemented together, which means manual signal conversion work is also needed, which reduces the integrity and robustness of the fault diagnosis method. In this paper, a novel network named WPT-CNN is proposed for end-to-end intelligent fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. WPT-CNN creatively uses the standard deep neural network structure to realize the wavelet packet transform (WPT) time-frequency analysis function, which seamlessly integrates fault diagnosis domain knowledge into deep learning algorithms. The overall network architecture can be trained with gradient descent backpropagation algorithms, indicating that the time-frequency analysis module of WPT-CNN is also able to learn the dataset characteristics, adaptively representing signal information in the most suitable way. Two experimental rolling bearing fault datasets were used to validate the proposed method. Testing results showed that WPT-CNN obtained the testing accuracies of 99.73% and 99.89%, respectively, in two datasets, which exhibited a better and more reliable diagnosis performance than any other existing deep learning and machine learning methods.
Keywords: bearing; convolutional neural network; deep learning; fault diagnosis; sensor signal; wavelet packet transform.