A new automatic bearing fault size diagnosis using time-frequency images of CWT and deep transfer learning methods

Abstract

Bearings are generally used as bearings or turning elements. Bearings are subjected to high loads and rapid speeds. Furthermore, metal-to-metal contact within the bearing makes it sensitive. In today's machines, bearing failures disrupt the operation of the system or completely stop the system. Bearing failures that can occur can cause enormous damage to the entire system. Therefore, it is necessary to anticipate bearing failures and to carry out a regular diagnostic examination. Various systems have been developed for fault diagnosis. In recent years, deep transfer learning (DTL) methods are often preferred in current bearing diagnosis models, as they provide time savings and high success rates. Deep transfer learning models also improve diagnosis accuracy under certain conditions by greatly reducing human intervention. Diagnosis at the right time is very important for the sustainability and efficiency of industrial production. A technique based on continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and two dimensional (2D) convolutional neural networks (CNN) is presented in this paper to detect fault size from vibration data of various bearing failure types. Time-frequency (TF) color scalogram images for bearing vibration signals were obtained using the CWT method. Using AlexNet, GoogleNet, Resnet, VGG16, and VGG19 deep transfer learning methods with scalogram images, fault size prediction from vibration signals was performed. Five different transfer deep learning models were used for three different data sets. It was observed that the success rates obtained varied between 96.67% and 100%.