Diesel engine fault diagnosis for multiple industrial scenarios based on transfer learning

Fault diagnosis based on data-driven intelligence has recently attracted extensive interest owing to the rapid development of big data and deep-learning algorithms. However, when the amount of faulty data is limited, deep learning training is prone to overfitting. When the application scenario is changed, the generalization ability of the trained network is affected. In this study, a fault diagnosis architecture based on deep transfer learning is proposed to work with limited data and transfer between multiple scenarios. A wide convolution kernel convolutional long short-term memory neural network (WCL) was used to improve the feature extraction ability of fault data from a diesel engine with a low signal-to-noise ratio. A multiple transfer learning scheme based on WCL was further adopted to transfer the well-trained diagnostic knowledge of large-scale labeled source domain data to the target domain with limited samples. In addition, for diesel engines for various purposes, the knowledge transferability between different scenarios was studied. The algorithm evaluates the transfer performance of four different domains when the sample is insufficient, including the cross-fault type, cross-equipment type, cross-fault degree, and cross-working conditions. The results show the proposed method is proven with high noise immunity improves the accuracy of small sample cross-domain diagnosis and provides an optimal transfer scheme suitable for diesel engine fault signals.