Multi-Source Information Fusion Fault Diagnosis for Gearboxes Based on SDP and VGG

Abstract

A decision-level approach using multi-sensor-based symmetry dot pattern (SDP) analysis with a Visual Geometry Group 16 network (VGG16) fault diagnosis model for multi-source information fusion was proposed to realize accurate and comprehensive fault diagnosis of gearbox gear teeth. Firstly, the SDP technique was used to perform a feature-level fusion of the fault states of gearbox gear collected by multiple sensors, which could initially visualize the vibration states of the gear teeth in different states. Secondly, the SDP images obtained were combined with the deep learning VGG16. In this way, the local diagnostic results of each sensor can be easily obtained. Finally, the local diagnostic results of each sensor were combined with the DS evidence theory to achieve decision-level fusion, which can better realize comprehensive fault detection for gearbox gear teeth. Before fusion, the accuracies of the three sensors were 96.43%, 93.97%, and 93.28%, respectively. When sensor 1 and sensor 2 were fused, the accuracy reached 99.93%, which is 3.52% and 6.34% better than when using sensors 1 and 2, respectively, alone. When sensor 1 and sensor 3 were fused, the accuracy reached 99.96%, marking an improvement of 3.36% and 6.85% over individual use of sensors 1 and 3, respectively. When sensor 2 and sensor 3 were fused, the accuracy reached 99.40%, which is 5.78% and 6.56% better than individual use of sensors 2 and 3, respectively. When the three sensors were fused simultaneously, the accuracy reached 99.98%, which is 3.68%, 6.40%, and 7.18% better than individual use of sensors 1, 2, and 3, respectively.