A distinguished deep learning method for gear fault classification using time–frequency representation

Abstract

Fault diagnosis of gearboxes has attracted increasing interest in recent decades due to their ubiquity and importance in the industry. Modern research trends focus on developing a diagnosis system that works automatically with the application of artificial intelligence. These previous studies have used the Deep Learning (DL) network without adequately addressing noise of the input data, requiring more data to achieve effective training. Thus, this work proposes a novel Transfer Learning method using the time–frequency representation of gear vibration signals, which enables more accurate classification in complex working conditions and reduces necessary input data to train. Using fine-tuning techniques proposed in this paper requires only a limited data set while ensuring acceptable classification results. An experiment test rig within different gear faults and load conditions was set up to evaluate the algorithm’s effectiveness.