Rotating machinery fault diagnosis based on a novel lightweight convolutional neural network

The advancement of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has laid more emphasis on reducing the parameter amount and storage space of the model in addition to the automatic and accurate fault diagnosis. In this case, this paper proposes a lightweight convolutional neural network (LCNN) method for intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating machinery, which can largely satisfy the need of less parameter amount and storage space as well as high accuracy. First, light-weight convolution blocks are constructed through basic elements such as spatial separable convolutions with the aim to effectively reduce model parameters. Secondly, the LCNN model for the intelligent fault diagnosis is constructed via lightweight convolution blocks instead of the tradi-tional convolution operation. Finally, to address the “black box” problem, the entire network is visualized through Tensorboard and t-distribution stochastic neighbor embedding. The results demonstrate that when the number of lightweight convolutional blocks reaches 6, the diagnosis accuracy of the LCNN model exceeds 99.9%. And the proposed model has become the most robust with parameters significantly decreasing. Furthermore, the proposed LCNN model has realized accurate, automatic, and robust fault diagnosis of rotating machinery, which makes it more suitable for deployment under the IIoT context.