An Intelligent Machinery Fault Diagnosis Method Based on GAN and Transfer Learning under Variable Working Conditions

Intelligent fault diagnosis is of great significance to guarantee the safe operation of mechanical equipment. However, the widely used diagnosis models rely on sufficient independent and homogeneously distributed monitoring data to train the model. In practice, the available data of mechanical equipment faults are insufficient and the data distribution varies greatly under different working conditions, which leads to the low accuracy of the trained diagnostic model and restricts it, making it difficult to apply to other working conditions. To address these problems, a novel fault diagnosis method combining a generative adversarial network and transfer learning is proposed in this paper. Dummy samples with similar fault characteristics to the actual engineering monitoring data are generated by the generative adversarial network to expand the dataset. The transfer fault characteristics of monitoring data under different working conditions are extracted by a deep residual network. Domain-adapted regular term constraints are formulated to the training process of the deep residual network to form a deep transfer fault diagnosis model. The bearing fault data are used as the original dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the influence of insufficient original monitoring data and enable the migration of fault diagnosis knowledge under different working conditions.