Acoustic spectral imaging and transfer learning for reliable bearing fault diagnosis under variable speed conditions.

Incipient fault diagnosis of a bearing requires robust feature representation for an accurate condition-based monitoring system. Existing fault diagnosis schemes are mostly confined to manual features and traditional machine learning approaches such as artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM). These handcrafted features require substantial human expertise and domain knowledge. In addition, these feature characteristics vary with the bearing's rotational speed. Thus, such methods do not yield the best results under variable speed conditions. To address this issue, this paper presents a reliable fault diagnosis scheme based on acoustic spectral imaging (ASI) of acoustic emission (AE) signals as a precise health state. These health states are further utilized with transfer learning, which is a machine learning technique, which shares knowledge with convolutional neural networks (CNN) for accurate diagnosis under variable operating conditions. In ASI, the amplitudes of the spectral components of the windowed time-domain acoustic emission signal are transformed into spectrum imaging. ASI provides a visual representation of acoustic emission spectral features in images. This ensures enhanced spectral images for transfer learning (TL) testing and training, and thus provides a robust classifier technique with high diagnostic accuracy

Multi-sensor fusion-based time-frequency imaging and transfer learning for spherical tank crack diagnosis under variable pressure conditions.

In this paper, a crack diagnosis framework is proposed that combines a new signal-to-imaging technique and transfer learning-aided deep learning framework to automate the diagnostic process. The objective of the signal-to-imaging technique is to convert one-dimensional (1D) acoustic emission (AE) signals from multiple sensors into a two-dimensional (2D) image to capture information under variable operating conditions. In this process, a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is first applied to the AE signal of each sensor, and the STFT results from the different sensors are then fused to obtain a condition-invariant 2D image of cracks; this scheme is denoted as Multi-Sensors Fusion-based Time-Frequency Imaging (MSFTFI). The MSFTFI images are subsequently fed to the fine-tuned transfer learning (FTL) model built on a convolutional neural network (CNN) framework for diagnosing crack types. The proposed diagnostic scheme (MSFTFI + FTL) is tested with a standard AE dataset collected from a self-designed spherical tank to validate the performance under variable pressure conditions. The results suggest that the proposed strategy significantly outperformed classical methods with average performance improvements of 2.36–20.26%