Fault Diagnosis Method for Rotating Machinery Based on Multi-scale Features

Abstract The vibration signals of rotating machinery usually contain various natural oscillation modes, exhibiting multi-scale features. This paper proposes a Multi-Branch one-dimensional deep Convolutional Neural Network model (MBCNN) that can extract multi-scale features from raw data hierarchically, thereby improving the diagnostic accuracy of gearbox faults in noisy environments. Meanwhile, the algorithms for multi-branch generation and algorithms of the convolution and pooling for each branch are deducted. The MBCNN integrates multiple branches with interrelated convolution kernels of different widths, and each branch can extract the high-level features of the signal. The network parameters of each branch are adjusted by the loss function, which makes the features of the branches complementary. Through the design of MBCNN, the local, global, deep layer and comprehensive information can be obtained from the raw data. On the widely used Case Western Reserve University Bearing Dataset, this paper conducted a performance comparison between the proposed MBCNN and other baselines including the shallow learning methods, 1D-CNN, and multi-scale feature learning methods. Moreover, our gearbox dataset was conducted on a fault diagnosis platform, and a series of experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the MBCNN. The results indicate that the MBCNN can identify the faults in the gearbox with an accuracy of higher than 92%, and the average validation time per sample is less than 3.2 ms. In a noisy environment, the diagnostic accuracy can reach 90%. The proposed MBCNN provides an effective and intelligent detection method to identify the faults of rotating machinery in the manufacturing processes.