A Stacked Autoencoder-Based Deep Neural Network for Achieving Gearbox Fault Diagnosis

Machinery fault diagnosis is pretty vital in modern manufacturing industry since an early detection can avoid some dangerous situations. Among various diagnosis methods, data-driven approaches are gaining popularity with the widespread development of data analysis techniques. In this research, an effective deep learning method known as stacked autoencoders (SAEs) is proposed to solve gearbox fault diagnosis. The proposed method can directly extract salient features from frequency-domain signals and eliminate the exhausted use of handcrafted features. Furthermore, to reduce the overfitting problem in training process and improve the performance for small training set, dropout technique and ReLU activation function are introduced into SAEs. Two gearbox datasets are employed to conform the effectiveness of the proposed method; the result indicates that the proposed method can not only achieve significant improvement but also is superior to the raw SAEs and some other traditional methods.