A Novel Deep Feature Learning Method Based on the Fused-Stacked AEs for Planetary Gear Fault Diagnosis

Planetary gear is the key component of the transmission system of electromechanical equipment for energy industry, and it is easy to damage, which affects the reliability and operation efficiency of electromechanical equipment of energy industry. Therefore, it is of great significance to extract the useful fault features and diagnose faults based on raw vibration signals. In this paper, a novel deep feature learning method based on the fused-stacked autoencoders (AEs) for planetary gear fault diagnosis was proposed. First, to improve the data learning ability and the robustness of feature extraction process of AE model, the sparse autoencoder (SAE) and the contractive autoencoder (CAE) were studied, respectively. Then, the quantum ant colony algorithm (QACA) was used to optimize the specific location and key parameters of SAEs and CAEs in deep learning architecture, and multiple SAEs and multiple CAEs were stacked alternately to form a novel deep learning architecture, which gave the deep learning architecture better data learning ability and robustness of feature extraction. The experimental results show that the proposed method can address the raw vibration signals of planetary gear. Compared with other deep learning architectures and shallow learning architecture, the proposed method has better diagnosis performance, and it is an effective method of deep feature learning and fault diagnosis.