Fault Diagnosis Method for Axial Piston Pump Slipper Wear Based on Symmetric Dot Pattern and Multi-Channel Densely Connected Convolutional Networks

Fault diagnosis in axial piston pumps is key to ensuring the proper operation of a hydraulic system. Slipper wear, as a typical fault in piston pumps, is challenging to accurately diagnose because the faults are very similar for different forms and degrees of wear. The achievement of accurate fault diagnosis of different forms and degrees of wear in the slipper will greatly improve the reliability of axial piston pump operation and, at the same time, provide new ideas for research into similar fault diagnosis problems in other rotating machinery. Therefore, a method of fault diagnosis based on the following symmetric dot pattern (SDP) and multi-channel densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNet) is proposed in this paper. The method applies an SDP transformation to transform the slipper failure signal into an SDP image, which achieves the fusion of triaxial vibration signals and enriches the signal features. The inception module is improved by replacing the original structure with larger convolutional kernels in multiple branches and decomposing the larger convolutional kernels. The inception module, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM), and the DropBlock method are introduced into DenseNet to improve feature extraction capability, computational efficiency, and model generalization ability. Experiments are performed on several slipper wear fault SDP image datasets, and all the indices produced by the proposed method are higher than those of the traditional convolutional neural networks, which fully proves the effectiveness and superiority of the procedure.