A digital twin-driven approach for partial domain fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven fault diagnosis methods are crucial for ensuring rotating machinery's safety and effective operation. The success of most current methods relies on the assumption that sufficient high-quality labeled datasets can be obtained for model training. However, in real-world industrial scenarios, obtaining such datasets is difficult or nearly impossible, thereby hindering the practical implementation of these methods. The integration of virtual modeling and transfer learning offers a powerful approach to meet the above challenge. Abundant virtual data of different fault categories can be acquired in the virtual space with highly flexible and at a low cost, and transfer learning can enhance the practical utility of these virtual data for contributing to the construction of diagnosis models. Therefore, this paper proposes a digital twin-driven partial domain fault diagnosis method based on unlabeled physical data and labeled virtual data. First, a virtual model of rotating machinery is built to generate labeled virtual fault data with enough fault types. Then, an adversarial transfer learning network is developed to leverage the effective knowledge from the virtual and physical data. Meanwhile, a weighting learning module is introduced to reduce the negative effect caused by the redundant fault categories in the virtual space. Finally, the proposed digital twin-driven transfer learning network is trained with the labeled virtual data and unlabeled physical data. Experiments on a light truck transmission system demonstrate that the proposed method achieves satisfactory diagnostic performance even without labeled physical fault data, contributing to the advancement of AI engineering applications.