A novel method for early gear pitting fault diagnosis using stacked SAE and GBRBM

Research on data-driven fault diagnosis methods has received much attention in recent years. The deep belief network (DBN) is a commonly used deep learning method for fault diagnosis. In the past, when people used DBN to diagnose gear pitting faults, it was found that the diagnosis result was not good with continuous time domain vibration signals as direct inputs into DBN. Therefore, most researchers extracted features from time domain vibration signals as inputs into DBN. However, it is desirable to use raw vibration signals as direct inputs to achieve good fault diagnosis results. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel method by stacking spare autoencoder (SAE) and Gauss-Binary restricted Boltzmann machine (GBRBM) for early gear pitting faults diagnosis with raw vibration signals as direct inputs. The SAE layer is used to compress the raw vibration data and the GBRBM layer is used to effectively process continuous time domain vibration signals. Vibration signals of seven early gear pitting faults collected from a gear test rig are used to validate the proposed method. The validation results show that the proposed method maintains a good diagnosis performance under different working conditions and gives higher diagnosis accuracy compared to other traditional methods.