Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on STFT-Deep Learning and Sound Signals

The main challenge of fault diagnosis lies in finding good fault features. A deep learning network has the ability to automatically learn good characteristics from input data in an unsupervised fashion, and its unique layer-wise pretraining and fine-tuning using the backpropagation strategy can solve the difficulties of training deep multilayer networks. Stacked sparse autoencoders or other deep architectures have shown excellent performance in speech recognition, face recognition, text classification, image recognition, and other application domains. Thus far, however, there have been very few research studies on deep learning in fault diagnosis. In this paper, a new rolling bearing fault diagnosis method that is based on short-time Fourier transform and stacked sparse autoencoder is first proposed; this method analyzes sound signals. After spectrograms are obtained by short-time Fourier transform, stacked sparse autoencoder is employed to automatically extract the fault features, and softmax regression is adopted as the method for classifying the fault modes. The proposed method, when applied to sound signals that are obtained from a rolling bearing test rig, is compared with empirical mode decomposition, Teager energy operator, and stacked sparse autoencoder when using vibration signals to verify the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method.