Fault diagnosis of axial piston pumps with multi-sensor data and convolutional neural network

Axial piston pumps have wide applications in hydraulic systems for power transmission. Their condition monitoring and fault diagnosis are essential in ensuring the safety and reliability of the entire hydraulic system. Vibration and discharge pressure signals are two common signals used for the fault diagnosis of axial piston pumps because of their sensitivity to pump health conditions. However, most of the previous fault diagnosis methods only used vibration or pressure signal, and literatures related to multi-sensor data fusion for the pump fault diagnosis are limited. This paper presents an end-to-end multi-sensor data fusion method for the fault diagnosis of axial piston pumps. The vibration and pressure signals under different pump health conditions are fused into RGB images and then recognized by a convolutional neural network. Experiments were performed on an axial piston pump to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed multi-sensor data fusion method greatly improves the fault diagnosis of axial piston pumps in terms of accuracy and robustness and has better diagnostic performance than other existing diagnosis methods.