Intelligent fault diagnosis across varying working conditions using triplex transfer LSTM for enhanced generalization

Abstract

Fault diagnosis plays a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability and efficiency of industrial machinery. While various machine/deep learning algorithms have been employed extensively for diagnosing faults in bearings and gears, the scarcity of data and the limited availability of labels have become a major bottleneck in developing data-driven diagnosis approaches, restricting the accuracy of deep networks. To overcome the limitations of insufficient labeled data and domain shift problems, an intelligent, data-driven approach based on the Triplex Transfer Long Short-Term Memory (TTLSTM) network is presented, which leverages transfer learning and fine-tuning strategies. Our proposed methodology uses empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to extract pertinent features from raw vibrational signals and utilizes Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC) for feature selection. L2 regularization transfer learning is utilized to mitigate the overfitting problem and to improve the model’s adaptability in diverse working conditions, especially in scenarios with limited labeled data. Compared with traditional transfer learning approaches, such as TCA, BDA, and JDA, which demonstrate accuracies in the range of 40–50%, our proposed model excels in identifying machinery faults with minimal labeled data by achieving 99.09% accuracy. Moreover, it performs significantly better than classical methods like SVM, RF, and CNN-based networks found in the literature, demonstrating the improved performance of our approach in fault diagnosis under varying working conditions and proving its applicability in real-world applications.