Tianfu Li

Baorui Dai, Gaëtan Frusque, Tianfu Li et al.

The application of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA)-based fault diagnosis methods has shown significant efficacy in industrial settings, facilitating the transfer of operational experience and fault signatures between different operating conditions, different units of a fleet or between simulated and real data. However, in real industrial scenarios, unknown levels and types of noise can amplify the difficulty of domain alignment, thus severely affecting the diagnostic performance of deep learning models. To address this issue, we propose an UDA method called Smart Filter-Aided Domain Adversarial Neural Network (SFDANN) for fault diagnosis in noisy industrial scenarios. The proposed methodology comprises two steps. In the first step, we develop a smart filter that dynamically enforces similarity between the source and target domain data in the time-frequency domain. This is achieved by combining a learnable wavelet packet transform network (LWPT) and a traditional wavelet packet transform module. In the second step, we input the data reconstructed by the smart filter into a domain adversarial neural network (DANN). To learn domain-invariant and discriminative features, the learnable modules of SFDANN are trained in a unified manner with three objectives: time-frequency feature proximity, domain alignment, and fault classification. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed SFDANN method based on two fault diagnosis cases: one involving fault diagnosis of bearings in noisy environments and another involving fault diagnosis of slab tracks in a train-track-bridge coupling vibration system, where the transfer task involves transferring from numerical simulations to field measurements. Results show that compared to other representative state of the art UDA methods, SFDANN exhibits superior performance and remarkable stability.

Zhibin Zhao, Tianfu Li, Jingyao Wu et al.

With the development of deep learning (DL) techniques, rotating machinery intelligent diagnosis has gone through tremendous progress with verified success and the classification accuracies of many DL-based intelligent diagnosis algorithms are tending to 100\%. However, different datasets, configurations, and hyper-parameters are often recommended to be used in performance verification for different types of models, and few open source codes are made public for evaluation and comparisons. Therefore, unfair comparisons and ineffective improvement may exist in rotating machinery intelligent diagnosis, which limits the advancement of this field. To address these issues, we perform an extensive evaluation of four kinds of models, including multi-layer perception (MLP), auto-encoder (AE), convolutional neural network (CNN), and recurrent neural network (RNN), with various datasets to provide a benchmark study within the same framework. We first gather most of the publicly available datasets and give the complete benchmark study of DL-based intelligent algorithms under two data split strategies, five input formats, three normalization methods, and four augmentation methods. Second, we integrate the whole evaluation codes into a code library and release this code library to the public for better development of this field. Third, we use specific-designed cases to point out the existing issues, including class imbalance, generalization ability, interpretability, few-shot learning, and model selection. By these works, we release a unified code framework for comparing and testing models fairly and quickly, emphasize the importance of open source codes, provide the baseline accuracy (a lower bound) to avoid useless improvement, and discuss potential future directions in this field. The code library is available at https://github.com/ZhaoZhibin/DL-based-Intelligent-Diagnosis-Benchmark.

Tianfu Li, Zhibin Zhao, Chuang Sun et al.

Convolutional neural network (CNN), with ability of feature learning and nonlinear mapping, has demonstrated its effectiveness in prognostics and health management (PHM). However, explanation on the physical meaning of a CNN architecture has rarely been studied. In this paper, a novel wavelet driven deep neural network termed as WaveletKernelNet (WKN) is presented, where a continuous wavelet convolutional (CWConv) layer is designed to replace the first convolutional layer of the standard CNN. This enables the first CWConv layer to discover more meaningful filters. Furthermore, only the scale parameter and translation parameter are directly learned from raw data at this CWConv layer. This provides a very effective way to obtain a customized filter bank, specifically tuned for extracting defect-related impact component embedded in the vibration signal. In addition, three experimental verification using data from laboratory environment are carried out to verify effectiveness of the proposed method for mechanical fault diagnosis. The results show the importance of the designed CWConv layer and the output of CWConv layer is interpretable. Besides, it is found that WKN has fewer parameters, higher fault classification accuracy and faster convergence speed than standard CNN.