Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery under Noisy Environment Conditions Based on a 1-D Convolutional Autoencoder and 1-D Convolutional Neural Network

Deep learning methods have been widely used in the field of intelligent fault diagnosis due to their powerful feature learning and classification capabilities. However, it is easy to overfit depth models because of the large number of parameters brought by the multilayer-structure. As a result, the methods with excellent performance under experimental conditions may severely degrade under noisy environment conditions, which are ubiquitous in practical industrial applications. In this paper, a novel method combining a one-dimensional (1-D) denoising convolutional autoencoder (DCAE) and a 1-D convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to address this problem, whereby the former is used for noise reduction of raw vibration signals and the latter for fault diagnosis using the de-noised signals. The DCAE model is trained with noisy input for denoising learning. In the CNN model, a global average pooling layer, instead of fully-connected layers, is applied as a classifier to reduce the number of parameters and the risk of overfitting. In addition, randomly corrupted signals are adopted as training samples to improve the anti-noise diagnosis ability. The proposed method is validated by bearing and gearbox datasets mixed with Gaussian noise. The experimental result shows that the proposed DCAE model is effective in denoising and almost causes no loss of input information, while the using of global average pooling and input-corrupt training improves the anti-noise ability of the CNN model. As a result, the method combined the DCAE model and the CNN model can realize high-accuracy diagnosis even under noisy environment.