Integrated intelligent fault diagnosis approach of offshore wind turbine bearing based on information stream fusion and semi-supervised learning

Offshore wind turbines play a vital role in transferring wind energy to electricity, which could help relieve the energy crisis and improve the global climate. In general, offshore wind turbines are installed open sea to avoid the potential interruption of people’s daily life. In such kind of harsh operating environment, the wind turbine transmission system is prone to failure, especially for the rolling bearings. Therefore, it is crucial to conduct condition monitoring of rolling bearings to ensure the safe and efficient operation of offshore wind turbines. Intelligent fault diagnosis is a research hotspot for condition monitoring of rolling bearings. However, the existing intelligent fault diagnosis techniques have some limitations. For example, most of the existing techniques were developed based on single sensory data, which can lead to inaccurate and unstable diagnostic results. Moreover, most existing techniques implicitly assume that there are sufficient labeled samples for classifier training. This may not be the case for offshore wind turbines where the labeled samples are limited. To address the aforementioned issues, an intelligent fault diagnosis technique by integrating an information stream fusion and a semi-supervised learning approach is proposed in this study. In the proposed method, a coupled convolutional residual network is proposed to realize the information streams fusion, in which the vibration signal and acoustic emission signal are served as the inputs of the proposed network, and then a concatenation operation is used to fuse the features obtained from two information streams. Meanwhile, a semi-supervised learning approach is also proposed, which can utilize the labeled samples, the correctly predicted samples, and the unlabeled samples to improve diagnostic accuracy. The diagnostic result on the experimental offshore wind turbine bearing dataset demonstrates that the proposed method achieves the highest diagnostic accuracy compared to existing comparative methods.