Reliable Fault Diagnosis of Rotary Machine Bearings Using a Stacked Sparse Autoencoder-Based Deep Neural Network

Due to enhanced safety, cost-effectiveness, and reliability requirements, fault diagnosis of bearings using vibration acceleration signals has been a key area of research over the past several decades. Many fault diagnosis algorithms have been developed that can efficiently classify faults under constant speed conditions. However, the performances of these traditional algorithms deteriorate with fluctuations of the shaft speed. In the past couple of years, deep learning algorithms have not only improved the classification performance in various disciplines (e.g., in image processing and natural language processing), but also reduced the complexity of feature extraction and selection processes. In this study, using complex envelope spectra and stacked sparse autoencoder- (SSAE-) based deep neural networks (DNNs), a fault diagnosis scheme is developed that can overcome fluctuations of the shaft speed. The complex envelope spectrum made the frequency components associated with each fault type vibrant, hence helping the autoencoders to learn the characteristic features from the given input signals more readily. Moreover, the implementation of SSAE-DNN for bearing fault diagnosis has avoided the need of handcrafted features that are used in traditional fault diagnosis schemes. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional fault diagnosis algorithms in terms of fault classification accuracy when tested with variable shaft speed data.