Deep learning based fault detection of automobile dry clutch system using spectrogram plots

Dry friction clutches are extremely important in the context of power transmission systems. Continuous exposure to extreme heat and loading makes clutch extremely susceptible to various faults. The timely detection and diagnosis of such faults are of utmost importance to prevent any damage to internal components and also helps in avoiding transmission system failures. In this research study, a novel approach that leverages the power of transfer learning (a famous deep learning technique) is proposed to diagnose multiple types of clutch faults including, worn release fingers, fractured pressure plates, deteriorated pressure plates, loss of friction material and distorted tangential strips using spectrogram plots. To train and validate the diagnostic system, vibration readings were taken from a specially designed test rig with the help of piezoelectric accelerometer while the clutch system was operated under different load conditions of 0 (no load), 5 and 10 kg This procedure of data collection was then repeated to acquire the vibration data for all of the fault conditions by replacing the good with fault components individually. These vibration signals were further processed and transformed into spectrogram plots that serves as the input data for the deep learning models considered. Fine-tuning techniques were applied on pretrained networks to maximise the prediction accuracy of the models to effectively determine and diagnose faults in the clutch system. For this study 12 pre-trained networks were chosen namely, Xception, InceptionResNet, DenseNet, AlexNet, VGG16, GoogLeNet, VGG19, ResNet101, ResNet50, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2 and ShuffleNet. To optimize the performance of deep learning models, a systematic adjustment of hyperparameters such as the train-test split ratio, learning rate, optimizer and batch size for each network model was carried out. Through careful experimentation and analysis, significant improvements in fault classification accuracy were achieved thereby enhancing the reliability and effectiveness of the diagnostic system. From the results it was noted that 100% classification accuracy was displayed by AlexNet (for the no load condition and the 10 kg load condition) and GoogLeNet (for 5 kg load condition) with extremely low computation times.