Speed adaptive gate: A novel auxiliary branch for enhancing deep learning-based rotating machinery fault classification under varying speed conditions

Abstract

Rotating machines like wind turbines often work under varying speed conditions. Faults may occur in these machines as time goes on. It is important to detect faults early and classify the type and the severity of an occurred fault, so that timely maintenance could be scheduled. This paper attempts to improve the fault classification accuracy of existing deep learning models when they are used for the fault classification of rotating machinery that operates under varying speed conditions. To achieve this goal, we firstly investigate the effects of speed variation from the perspective of deep learning. We find that the fault information in vibration signals is imbalanced due to speed variation. The imbalance future deteriorates the fault classification accuracy of deep learning models. That is, the accuracy does not evenly distribute across speed but increases with speed. We then propose an auxiliary branch named speed adaptive gate (SAG) for existing deep learning models to address the speed induced fault information imbalance. The SAG takes the speed signal as the input and outputs speed adaptive gate values. The gate values control the information flow of deep learning models so that the effects of speed variation are mitigated. Case studies with two baseline models, i.e., a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a residual network (ResNet), over two experimental datasets, i.e., a planetary gearbox dataset and a fixed-shaft gearbox dataset, have validated the effectiveness of the proposed SAG and its superiority over existing approaches.