Abstract

Fault diagnosis is an effective tool to guarantee safe operations in gearboxes. Acoustic and vibratory measurements in such mechanical devices are all sensitive to the existence of faults. This work addresses the use of a deep random forest fusion (DRFF) technique to improve fault diagnosis performance for gearboxes by using measurements of an acoustic emission (AE) sensor and an accelerometer that are used for monitoring the gearbox condition simultaneously. The statistical parameters of the wavelet packet transform (WPT) are first produced from the AE signal and the vibratory signal, respectively. Two deep Boltzmann machines (DBMs) are then developed for deep representations of the WPT statistical parameters. A random forest is finally suggested to fuse the outputs of the two DBMs as the integrated DRFF model. The proposed DRFF technique is evaluated using gearbox fault diagnosis experiments under different operational conditions, and achieves 97.68% of the classification rate for 11 different condition patterns. Compared to other peer algorithms, the addressed method exhibits the best performance. The results indicate that the deep learning fusion of acoustic and vibratory signals may improve fault diagnosis capabilities for gearboxes. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.