A gear fault diagnosis method based on reactive power and semi-supervised learning

Abstract In gearbox gear fault diagnosis based on motor current signals, the gear fault characteristic frequency component is often overshadowed by the fundamental frequency component of the current. In addition, the complex working conditions during actual production and use make it difficult to collect gear operation monitoring data containing labeled feature information. To address the above problems, a semi-supervised learning method based on reactive power signals is proposed for gear fault diagnosis of gearboxes. First, the method utilizes the Hilbert transform to process the current signal of the drive motor in the mechanical system, from which the reactive power is constructed. Then, the reactive power signal is analyzed by spectral analysis as a basis for gear fault diagnosis. Subsequently, the GAF-CNN-MTDL(Gramian angular field—convolutional neural network-mean teacher deep learning) fault diagnosis model is proposed to convert the reactive power signal into a two-dimensional image by using the GAF, and the semi-supervised training method of the average teacher is applied to input the fault dataset into the gear fault diagnosis model which is based on the CNN as the main backbone after the fault dataset has been divided into the labeled and the unlabeled dataset in accordance with a certain ratio. Finally, the gear fault dataset is used for method validation. The experimental outcomes demonstrate the method’s proficiency in effectively emphasizing the fault feature information pertaining to the gear part, and the introduced GAF-CNN-MTDL fault diagnosis model enables the utilization of a minimal number of labeled samples to achieve highly accurate gear fault diagnosis.