A Novel Deep Transfer Learning Method for Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Based on Variational Mode Decomposition and Efficient Channel Attention

In recent years, deep learning has been applied to intelligent fault diagnosis and has achieved great success. However, the fault diagnosis method of deep learning assumes that the training dataset and the test dataset are obtained under the same operating conditions. This condition can hardly be met in real application scenarios. Additionally, signal preprocessing technology also has an important influence on intelligent fault diagnosis. How to effectively relate signal preprocessing to a transfer diagnostic model is a challenge. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel deep transfer learning method for intelligent fault diagnosis based on Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) and Efficient Channel Attention (ECA). In the proposed method, the VMD adaptively matches the optimal center frequency and finite bandwidth of each mode to achieve effective separation of signals. To fuse the mode features more effectively after VMD decomposition, ECA is used to learn channel attention. The experimental results show that the proposed signal preprocessing and feature fusion module can increase the accuracy and generality of the transfer diagnostic model. Moreover, we comprehensively analyze and compare our method with state-of-the-art methods at different noise levels, and the results show that our proposed method has better robustness and generalization performance.