Initial Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearing Based on Second-Order Cyclic Autocorrelation and DCAE Combined With Transfer Learning

Under actual working conditions, the initial faults of rolling bearings are difficult to be predicted effectively because of the lack of prior fault knowledge, weak fault information, and strong noise interference. How to enhance the fault characteristics while removing the vibration signal noise of rolling bearings has become the key challenge to the field of early fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. Based on the above problems, a rolling bearing initial fault diagnosis model based on second-order cyclic autocorrelation (Soca) and deep auto-encoder (AE) combined with transfer learning (TL) was proposed to improve the overall performance of rolling bearing fault identification. First, the Soca is used to estimate the second-order cyclic statistics of the vibration signal, which can better highlight the periodic pulse characteristics of rolling bearings and suppress random noise to a certain extent. After that, the dataset containing the valuable health state information of the rolling bearing is input into the denoising and contraction auto-encoder (DCAE). The advantages of denoising AEs (DAEs) and contraction AEs are fully utilized to extract the initial fault characteristics of rolling bearings. Finally, the balanced distribution adaptation (BDA) is used to reduce the distribution difference and class spacing of the transferable features extracted from the original datasets and the target datasets, and the initial fault diagnosis of the target rolling bearing is diagnosed according to the feature knowledge of the source rolling bearing. In three experimental datasets, six TL experiments were carried out to verify that the Soca-Denoising auto-encoder, Contraction auto-encoder and Transfer learning (DCT) model can effectively enhance the initial fault characteristics of rolling bearings, and has higher diagnostic accuracy and robustness compared with the existing initial fault diagnosis methods of rolling bearings. This method has a good application prospect in the field of early fault diagnosis of rolling bearings.