An improved convolutional neural network with an adaptable learning rate towards multi-signal fault diagnosis of hydraulic piston pump

Hydraulic piston pump is a vital component of hydraulic transmission system and plays a critical role in some modern industrials. On account of the deficiencies of traditional fault diagnosis in preprocessing of original data and feature extraction, the intelligent methods based on deep learning accomplish the automatic learning of fault information by integrating feature extraction and classification. As a popular deep learning model, convolutional neural network (CNN) has been demonstrated to be potent and effective in image classification. In this research, an improved intelligent method based on CNN with adapting learning rate is constructed for fault diagnosis of a hydraulic piston pump. Firstly, three raw signals are converted into two dimensional time–frequency images by continuous wavelet transform, including vibration signal, pressure signal and sound signal. Secondly, an improved deep CNN model is built with an adaptive learning rate strategy for identifying the different fault types. Moreover, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding is employed to visualize the distribution of features learned by the main layers of CNN model. Confusion matrix is used to analyze the classification accuracy of each fault type. Compared with the CNN model without adapting learning rate, the improved model achieves a higher accuracy based on the selected three kinds of signals. Experiments indicate that the improved CNN model can effectively and accurately identify various faults for a hydraulic piston pump.