A dynamic-model-based fault diagnosis method for a wind turbine planetary gearbox using a deep learning network

Abstract The planetary gearbox is a critical part of wind turbines, and has great significance for their safety and reliability. Intelligent fault diagnosis methods for these gearboxes have made some achievements based on the availability of large quantities of labeled data. However, the data collected from the diagnosed devices are always unlabeled, and the acquisition of fault data from real gearboxes is time-consuming and laborious. As some gearbox faults can be conveniently simulated by a relatively precise dynamic model, the data from dynamic simulation containing some features are related to those from the actual machines. As a potential tool, transfer learning adapts a network trained in a source domain to its application in a target domain. Therefore, a novel fault diagnosis method combining transfer learning with dynamic model is proposed to identify the health conditions of planetary gearboxes. In the method, a modified lumped-parameter dynamic model of a planetary gear train is established to simulate the resultant vibration signal, while an optimized deep transfer learning network based on a one-dimensional convolutional neural network is built to extract domain-invariant features from different domains to achieve fault classification. Various groups of transfer diagnosis experiments of planetary gearboxes are carried out, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and the reliability of both the dynamic model and the proposed method.