Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, (2019), xxx(xx): xxx–xxx

Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics

& Beihang University
Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
cja@buaa.edu.cn
www.sciencedirect.com

Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw

vibration signal based on deep learning
Xueyi LI a, Jialin LI a, Yongzhi QU b, David HE a,c,*

a
School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China
b
School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China
c
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago IL 60607, USA

Received 20 December 2018; revised 28 January 2019; accepted 12 March 2019

KEYWORDS Abstract In aerospace industry, gears are the most common parts of a mechanical transmission
Deep learning; system. Gear pitting faults could cause the transmission system to crash and give rise to safety dis-
Gear pitting diagnosis; aster. It is always a challenging problem to diagnose the gear pitting condition directly through the
Gear teeth; raw signal of vibration. In this paper, a novel method named augmented deep sparse autoencoder
Raw vibration signal; (ADSAE) is proposed. The method can be used to diagnose the gear pitting fault with relatively few
Semi-supervised learning; raw vibration signal data. This method is mainly based on the theory of pitting fault diagnosis and
Sparse autoencoder creatively combines with both data augmentation ideology and the deep sparse autoencoder algo-
rithm for the fault diagnosis of gear wear. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by
experiments of six types of gear pitting conditions. The results show that the ADSAE method can
effectively increase the network generalization ability and robustness with very high accuracy. This
method can effectively diagnose different gear pitting conditions and show the obvious trend
according to the severity of gear wear faults. The results obtained by the ADSAE method proposed
in this paper are compared with those obtained by other common deep learning methods. This
paper provides an important insight into the field of gear fault diagnosis based on deep learning
and has a potential practical application value.
Ó 2019 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is
an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

1. Introduction
* Corresponding author at: School of Mechanical Engineering and
The aeronautic industry must rely on highly reliable compo-
Automation, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China.
E-mail address: davidhe@uic.edu (D. HE). nents and systems. In the aeronautic industry, aeronautic gear
Peer review under responsibility of Editorial Committee of CJA. pitting is one of the most common failures. Undetected aero-
nautic gear pitting failures can even lead to catastrophic failure
of aeronautic machines. Therefore, rotating machinery repre-
sented by aeronautic gear has always attracted the attention
Production and hosting by Elsevier of researchers.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2019.04.018
1000-9361 Ó 2019 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Please cite this article in press as: LI X et al. Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning, Chin J Aeronaut (2019), https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2019.04.018
2 X. LI et al.
The diagnostic methods for aeronautic gear pitting are
mainly divided into model-based methods and data-based
methods. The model-based approach is based on a dynamic
model for diagnosis. Fan et al.1 studied the influence of the
crack of the planet carrier plate on the dynamic characteristics
of the planetary gear train, and the dynamic model of the tor-
sional vibration of the planetary gear train with cracked planet
carrier was established. Thus an effective method for diagnos-
ing crack failures was found. Endo and Randall2 used the min-
imum entropy deconvolution (MED) technique to improve the
ability to exist autoregressive (AR) filtering techniques to
detect local gear failures. Wang and Wong3 based on the signal
averaging technique established an AR model of the vibration
signal for the healthy state gear. The model is then used as a
linear predictive error filter to process the future state signals
of the same gear and to characterize the health of the gears
by characterizing the error signals between the filtered and
unfiltered signals. Shen et al.4 proposed a fault diagnosis model
based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and multi-
sensor support vector machine (TSVM) and applied to the
fault diagnosis of gear reducer. Due to lower adaptability of
model-based methods, most of the data-based methods are
used now. Hong et al.5 summarized the wear mechanism (such
as abrasive wear, fatigue wear and adhesive wear), debris char-
acteristics (such as concentration, size, morphology, and com-
position), and analyzed the principle of the detection method.
Pandian et al.6 discussed alternative approaches to reliability
design, including similarity analysis, testing, and data analysis
for predictive and system health management. Li et al.7 studied
the use of deep random forest fusion (DRFF) technology to
improve the performance of gearbox fault diagnosis by using
acoustic emission sensors and accelerometers that simultane-
ously monitor gearbox conditions. Many studies have shown
that the data-based approach performs well.
The gear vibration signal collected by the acceleration sen-
sor is usually used as a detection signal for the gearbox failure,
and generally can obtain satisfactory results. Cerrada et al.8
studied a stable spur gear fault diagnosis system by selecting
the optimal frequency and time–frequency domain data from
the vibration signal. In the monitoring environment, genetic
algorithms and random forest-based classifiers are used for
fault diagnosis. Using the genetic algorithm, the classification
accuracy of 97% or more was still achieved. Li et al.9 reviewed
research progress on decoupling diagnosis of hybrid faults in
gear transmission systems using vibration sensor signals. In
that paper, the hybrid gearbox fault decoupling technology
was discussed.
In the era of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0, mon-
itoring data usually has the characteristics of large data vol-
ume, fast generation speed, and high sampling frequency.
Classic intelligent fault diagnosis methods include data acqui-
sition, feature extraction and selection, and fault identification
of shallow architectures. Gan et al.10 proposed a multi-domain
manifold (MDM) method based on singular value decomposi-
tion (SVD) and manifold learning to diagnose the mechanical
equipment fault. Maurya et al.11 proposed a new discrimina-
tive feature extraction technique based on the fusion of low-
level features or hand-crafted features and high-level features
to detect each fault, as well as potential abnormal in the
machine. Chen et al.12 elaborated the application of wavelet
transform based on an inner product in the fault diagnosis
of rotating machinery. Sanchez et al.13 extracted 20 features
Please cite this article in press as: LI X et al. Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning, Chin J Aeronaut (2019), https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2019.04.018
from each signal in the time domain, sort them by chi-square
and input them into the K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier,
which allows for classification accuracy evaluation of each
acquired signal and features analysis. Sanchez et al.14 took
advantage of ranking methods such as ReliefF, Chi-square,
and Information Gain are used to selecting the feature with
the largest amount of information, and then reduce the size
of the feature vector. Sharma and Parey15 summarized the sur-
vey research based on statistical indicators according to the
method used. And the unique fault characteristics of fixed
shaft gearboxes were identified and studied. These methods
also face many challenges, such as feature extraction that
requires expertise in machine models, diagnostics, signal pro-
cessing techniques, and shallow structures.
In recent years, deep learning, as a branch of machine
learning, has become more and more important to researchers.
Deep learning attempts to search the complexity and internal
relevance of a data set. They are using multiple processing lay-
ers or complex structures to mine the hidden information in
the data set for classification or other purposes. BP neural net-
work was used to train the gears of four typical failure modes,
and satisfactory results were obtained16. Jing et al.17 proposed
an adaptive multi-sensor data fusion diagnosis method based
on deep convolutional neural network. The method is capable
of learning features from raw data and adaptively optimizing
combinations of different fusion levels to meet the require-
ments of any fault diagnosis task. Qu et al.18 presented a
method that integrates dictionary learning in sparse coding
into an autoencoder (AE) network to perform gear pitting fail-
ure detection. That is the first time to apply unsupervised
learning algorithm to pitting failure detection of gears. Wang
et al.19 proposed an intelligent diagnostic system based on
batch normalization technology, which realized online moni-
toring and rapid fault diagnosis. In comparison with other
existing methods, their method improved the training speed
and diagnostic accuracy. Qu et al.20 showed that a completely
unsupervised method can potentially extract ‘‘trends” of
machine health status and can be directly used for online
anomaly detection or prediction. The experimental results
show that the unsupervised deep sparse autoencoder (SAE)
can separate the fault-related features from the uncorrelated
noise.
The deep learning method, especially the unsupervised
learning algorithm represented by the AE, has obvious differ-
ences from the traditional artificial neural network (ANN):
deep learning can mine the hidden correlation among projects
imported into the model, and unsupervised learning algorithm
can extract the compression characteristics of input data with-
out label intervention. There are certain advantages for intro-
ducing autoencoder into the field of aeronautic mechanical
fault diagnosis. First, an autoencoder can learn in an unsuper-
vised way. Therefore, when used for signal processing, it can
extract features automatically and hence effectively reduces
the needs for manual feature extraction that relies on human
expertise in signal processing. Second, for big data training
problems, autoencoder can avoid over-fitting effectively. Aero-
nautic machines usually have the ability to monitor data in
large quantities and can use deep learning algorithms to
extract features and find hidden information or correlation.
A novel method presented in this paper, augmented deep
sparse autoencoder (ADSAE), for diagnoses the pitting fault
of the gear.
Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning 3

The remaining chapters of this paper are organized as fol-
lows: Section 2 elaborates on the ADSAE algorithm presented
in this paper. Section 3 designed six experiments to verify the
effectiveness of the ADSAE algorithm in the classification of
gear pitting faults. Section 4 compares and discusses the exper-
imental results and looks forward to future research directions.
Section 5 summarizes the current research conclusions.
2. Methodology
The main idea of the ADSAE method is to make full use of the
information extraction ability of SAE for high-dimensional
signals, to extract the core information into lower dimension
signals. And using restored high-dimensional information
makes sure the SAE is efficient. The ADSAE is combined with
the theory of autoencoder and data enhancement to diagnosis
gear pitting faults.
der to add data from the low-dimensional data back to the
high-dimensional data during the decoding process. The enco-
der was used to get a valid representation. So after the training
is over, the researcher generally removes the decoder and only
retain the encoder. The output of the encoder can be used
directly as an input to other machine learning models.
The number of artificial neurons in the hidden layer of the
autoencoder may larger or smaller than the number of neurons
in the input layer. If regularization constraints are added to the
loss function of the artificial neural network, the autoencoder
at this time can be regarded as an SAE21. In an SAE, the aver-
age value of the hidden layer neuron output should be as zero
as possible, that is, most of the hidden layer neurons are inac-
^ of hidden layer neurons
tive. Eq. (1) is the average activation q
j:
m h i
1 X ðlÞ
^j ¼
q aj ðxi Þ ð1Þ
m i¼1

2.1. Sparse autoencoder where q ^j represents the average activation of the jth neuron,
andmrepresents the total number of samples in the data set.
ðlÞ
The main methods of unsupervised learning include principal aj ðxi Þ indicates the degree of activation of the hidden layer
component analysis and AE. The AE is the mainstream unsu- neuron j given the input data is xi , and l indicates the lth layer
pervised learning in deep learning. The autoencoder is mainly of the neural network. The expression of the SAE loss function
composed of input layer, hidden layer, and output layer. As is:
shown in Fig. 1, layer 1 is the input layer, from layer 2 to layer X
sl
 
4 are the hidden layer, and the layer 5 is the output layer. From Jsparse ðW; bÞ ¼ JðW; bÞ þ b ^j
KL qk q ð2Þ
layer 1 to layer 3 are the encoding part, and from layer 3 to j¼1
layer 5 are the decoding part. In Fig. 1, there are five input
where Jsparse represents the loss function of SAE, W represents
units in the neural network and five corresponding output
the weight matrix, b represents the bias term, KL represents the
units. xi represents the input of the neural network, and the cir-
relative entropy (KL divergence), b is weight of the sparsity
cle labeled ‘‘+1” is called the bias coefficient. The AE is a neu-
penalty term, q is the sparsity parameter, and sl is the cells
ral network model that can be used to extract features using
number of the lth layer. The first term in the Eq. (2) is the loss
unsupervised learning methods. The AE is reduced from the
function of the AE without sparse constraints, including the
high-dimensional space to the low-dimensional space in the
mean squared term and the weighted decay term. The concrete
encoding process, and then the encoded low-dimensional fea-
expression of JðW; bÞ is:
ture vector is decompressed in the decoding process as shown  m 
P 1 0  nP
l1 P lþ1 
sl sP 
in Fig. 1. The input data was reconstructed and mapped back ðlÞ
JðW; bÞ ¼ m 1
2
k yi  yi k2
þ k2 Wji 2 ð3Þ
to the high-dimensional space. It is suitable for target charac- i¼1 l¼1 i¼1 j¼1
terization, data compression, network pre-training and so on.
The encoder maps high-dimensional data to low-dimensional where k is the weight attenuation coefficient, nl1 is network
data based on the correlation between the input data. The layer number, and sl is the number of units in the correspond-
decoder decompresses the compressed data and uses the deco- ing layer.
The second term in the Eq. (2) is the sparse penalty term,
and the KL distance expression is:
  q 1q
^j ¼ qlg þ ð1  qÞlg
KL qk q ð4Þ
^j
q ^j
1q
where the weighting coefficient for controlling the sparsity pen-
alty term is b, and the sparsity parameter q is usually a smaller
value close to zero.
Stacked autoencoder was proposed by Benjio et al.22 Stacking
autoencoder extracts the advanced features of input data layer by
layer while reducing the dimension of the input data layer by
layer. This process transforms a complex input data into a series
of simple advanced features. Finally, the obtained advanced fea-
tures are input into a classifier to classify the raw data.

2.2. The data augmentation algorithm

The data enhancement part of the proposed method mainly

Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of autoencoder. includes two parts. The first part is to use the stacked autoen-

Please cite this article in press as: LI X et al. Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning, Chin J Aeronaut (2019), https://
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4 X. LI et al.
coder, and the other part is to use the data shifting to enhance
the SAE model. These two parts combine data enhancement of
the raw vibration signal of the gear which was a relatively
small amount of data. They can improve the detection ability
of the SAE for the pitting corrosion fault of the gear
effectively.
2.2.1. Augmentation of stacked autoencoders
The input characteristics of the SAE are compressed and
reduced by the encoder to extract the most core information.
After decoding, the data has the same dimensionality as the
original data. The verified decoded data is very close to the
original data, indicating that the SAE has the ability to expand
the original data set while retaining the original features. As
shown in Fig. 2, the original data enters the autoencoder I
and is encoded and decoded to obtain decoded data of the
same dimensional size as the original data set X. Then, the
original data and the decoded data are input to the autoen-
coder II, and after encoding and decoding, we can obtain the
data after decoding from the autoencoder II, and the output
data is twice the size of the original input data X. The input
data together with the output data from the autoencoder II
as input data into the autoencoder III. After the encoding
and decoding process of the autoencoder III, the encoded data
of 4 times the original data is obtained from the autoencoder
III. Therefore, the problem of insufficient data volume can
be partially solved, and the deep learning algorithm is better
for feature extraction.
As can be seen from Fig. 3, the image of the upper row is a
visualized image formed by the raw vibration data of the gear
before entering the encoder. It can be seen from the figure that
there are some differences in different signal data. The lower
row of images is an image formed by the SAE process. It
can be seen from the figure that the gears of different states
Fig. 2 Principle of using autoencoders to enhance data.
Fig. 3 Visual image of gear raw vibration signals before and after the SAE.
Please cite this article in press as: LI X et al. Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning, Chin J Aeronaut (2019), https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2019.04.018
have very similar characteristics between before the SAE and
after the SAE. These can be a good indication of the good per-
formance of the SAE for the compression of the signature
signal.
2.2.2. Augmentation of data shifting
Since deep learning is a fully connected network, each set of
feature data enters the neural network for training in units
of samples. And more group data can be obtained by shifting
a specified length in the overall sample. In general, the more
data that is trained in deep learning, the stronger the learning
ability of the network for features and the better the learning
effect. In the field of picture recognition,23 this method has
been used to improve the recognition ability of items in pic-
tures and has achieved good results.
The total number of sample points for collecting data is N.
The number of points that extract sample characteristics dur-
ing a period of gear rotation is R. The starting position is e,
and k is a decimal between 0 and 1. So the initial position e
can be acquired by Eq. (5), where k is the coefficient. All points
in this dataset Xi can be expressed by Eq. (6).
RN
e ¼ kR 0<k< ð5Þ
R
Xi ¼ fXe ; Xeþ1 ; . . . ; XeþN g ð6Þ
2.3. The general procedure of the proposed method
In this paper, the augmented method of data smooth shifting
extraction data is combined with the SAE method. On the
one hand, the enhancement of data can be used to improve
the learning ability of the network for gear pitting characteris-
tics. On the other hand, SAE can be used again to compress
and decompress the raw signal, extracting more efficient fea-
tures from the input of the SAE to detect and classify the gear
pitting failure.
The method proposed in this paper is aimed at the diagno-
sis of gear pitting, which is mainly divided into three parts:
data collection, network training, and gear pitting fault identi-
fication and classification. In the data collection part, the
accelerometer sensor is mainly used to collect the raw vibration
signals of the gear. In order to train in the deep learning net-
work better, the collected data is normalized so that all the
data have a uniform mean and variance. The network training
part mainly uses the back-propagation algorithm to adjust the
structure and hyperparameter of the network so that the
ADSAE structure can effectively learn the core compressed
information from the training data. In the fault identification
Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning
and classification part, the softmax layer is used to classify the
part of the encoder that was trained in the previous step. And
the test set is used to verify the correct rate of the training
result.
The general flow of the method proposed in this paper is
shown in Fig. 4.
1. Collect the raw vibration signal of the gear, and divide the
vibration signal data into a training set, verification set, and
test set according to the ratio of 80%, 10%, and 10%.
2. Process the training set according to the two enhancement
methods described above.
3. Initialize the training parameters in the autoencoder net-
work using the he_normal24 method. The he_normal
method draws samples from a truncated normal distribu-
h qffiffiffii
tion as follow: W  N 0; n2i , where ni is the number of
rows to initialize the matrix.
4. Using the back-propagation algorithm, the verification set
data, and loss function to adjust the training parameters,
optimize the network parameters and weights, and train
Fig. 4 General procedure of the presented ADSAE method.
Fig. 5
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5
the ADSAE network. Each ADSAE is independently
trained before stacking to ensure that each ADSAE is
converged.
5. Input the test set to the encoder portion of the ADSAE and
input the compressed feature from the encoder to the soft-
max classifier to classify the pitting of the gear.
3. Gear pitting diagnosis test setup
The test bench is shown in Fig. 5, consisting mainly of lubrica-
tion and cooling system, tri-axial acceleration sensor, and two
45 kW Siemens servo motors. One of the motors act as a drive
motor, and the other be configured as a load motor. The elec-
trically enclosed test rig is more cost effective than a conven-
tional open loop test rig. It can configure any load and speed
specification within the rated power range. The experimental
gearbox is supported by four sets of bearings and a pair of
gears engage and rotate. The tri-axial acceleration sensors
are mounted on the outside of the gearbox to collect vibration
signals of the gearbox. All experiments were carried out under
the same conditions to avoid the impact of changes in the
external environment around the gearbox. In the experiment,
the sampling rate was set as 20.48 kHz and the sampling time
interval was 6 s. Five sets of sample data were collected for
each condition and a total of 30 sets of independent sample
data. During the experiment, vibrational signals in three direc-
tions were collected. In the data processing, only signals from
the vertical direction were used. The principle of experimental
verification device is shown in Fig. 6. Enough gears were pur-
chased to ensure the smooth running of the experiment. The
parameters of the experimental gear are shown in Table 1.
Pitting corrosion of six gears as shown in Table 2. The pit-
ting percentage was quantified by identifying the pitting area
using the Adobe Photoshop software. The percentage of pit-
ting is the ratio of the area of the pitting of the tooth surface
to the total area of the tooth surface. Pitting percentage is an
approximation and is primarily used to distinguish the severity
of gear pitting fault. Condition (1) is a healthy gear without
pitting wear. The Condition (2) and the Condition (3) have
only the middle teeth slightly pitting. The intermediate tooth
pitting degree of Condition (2) and Condition (3) has about
20% and 30%, respectively. From Condition (4) to the Condi-
tion (6) in addition to the middle teeth have pitting, the
Photo of experimental equipment.
6 X. LI et al.

The picture of the specific degree of pitting is shown in

Fig. 7. Different pitting degrees can be seen in the picture.
Fig. 8 is a visualization of the raw vibration signal. The raw
vibration signal data length for each pitting state is 50,000
points. It can be seen from the figure that there is no significant
difference between the raw vibration signals of the gears of the
six different pitting states. If look closely, one can see that the
raw vibration signal of Condition (3) has a relatively obvious
oscillation point. The raw vibration signal of Condition (4)
has a slightly larger magnitude. In the remaining five condi-
tions, the gears can hardly directly classified directly depending
on the eyes. Under the premise of not transforming the raw
vibration signal in the time domain, the raw vibration signal
is processed by the ADSAE algorithm proposed in this paper.
As shown in Fig. 9, the left part is the raw vibration signal
Fig. 6 Experimental test device schematic. of the gear, and the right part is the output of the correspond-
ing raw vibration signal passing through the SAE network. It
can be seen from the six sets of signals in the figure that the
Table 1 Main parameters of the gearbox. vibration characteristics after the SAE signal are very similar
Gear parameter Driving gear Driven gear
to the raw signal. Although the characteristic is compressed,
almost all characteristic signals of the gear are retained in
Tooth number 40 72 the process of the SAE. It is apparent from the image that
Module (mm) 3 3
the SAE can effectively retain the characteristics of the raw
Base circle diameter (mm) 112.763 202.974
Pitch diameter (mm) 120 216
vibration of the gear and can generate a signal that is very
Pressure angle (°) 20 20 close to the raw signal.
Addendum coefficient 1 1 Judging whether the gear is normal or not according to the
Coefficient of top clearance 0.25 0.25 pseudo code of Table 3, the similarity of the pitting corrosion
Diametric pitch 8.4667 8.4667 is also judged by a similar method. In this experiment, each
Engaged angle (°) 19.7828 19.7828 sample includes 768 feature points, and the number of neurons
Circular pitch (mm) 9.42478 9.42478 in each layer of the neural network is 768-384-192-96-192-384-
Addendum (mm) 4.5 3.588 768, respectively. A total of 50 thousand augmented training
Dedendum (mm) 2.25 3.162 set samples participated in the training of ADSAE networks.
Addendum modification coefficient 0.5 0.196
The optimizer uses the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algo-
Addendum modification (mm) 1.5 0.588
Fillet radius (mm) 0.9 0.9
rithm, and the loss uses the classification cross entropy. The
Tooth thickness (mm) 5.8043 5.1404 initial learning rate was set to 0.01, the attenuation is
Tooth width (mm) 85 85 1  106, the momentum is 0.9, and the activation is relu. This
Theoretical center distance (mm) 168 168 training uses the Windows 7 operating system, with Intel Core
Actual center distance (mm) 170.002 170.002 i5-6500 processor, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics
card, Kingston DDR4 16 GB memory. The software used in
this experiment is mainly Python 3.6, CUDA 8.0, cudnn 9.2.

Table 2 Percentage of pitting of gears in six states. 4. Results and discussions

Pitting percentage Upper tooth Middle tooth Lower tooth

It can be seen from Table 4 that for the gear pitting faults of
Condition (1) Normal Normal Normal the same speed under different loads, the proposed ADSAE
Condition (2) Normal 10% Normal
algorithms can effectively diagnose the different pitting faults
Condition (3) Normal 30% Normal
of the gears, and the correct rate is over 99%. For different
Condition (4) 10% 50% Normal
Condition (5) 10% 50% 10% loads, the accuracy of the proposed method for the training
Condition (6) 30% 50% 10% set, the verification set, and the test set is similar, and there
is no obvious over-fitting phenomenon. The results show that
the proposed method is effective for gear pitting diagnosis.
The ADSAE proposed in this paper is compared with other
adjacent tooth has different degrees of pitting corrosion. The deep learning methods. The experimental conditions are under
intermediate tooth of the Condition (4) has 50% pitting, 800 r/min and 400 Nm torque. It can be seen from the results
and the upper tooth adjacent to the intermediate teeth have in Table 5 that the proposed method not only has high classi-
10% pitting. The intermediate tooth of the Condition (5) has fication accuracy for gear pitting but also can effectively avoid
about 50% pitting, and each of its adjacent upper and lower over-fitting. Other deep learning methods have more or less
teeth has 10% pitting. The intermediate tooth of the Condition over-fitting, and the accuracy is not particularly desirable.
(6) has 50% pitting, about 30% of the pitting of the adjacent As can be seen from Fig. 10, the identification rate of Con-
upper tooth, and about 10% of the wear of the adjacent lower dition (4) is 100%. The recognition rate of the other gear pit-
tooth. ting is also above 98%. Looking at the confusion matrix, it can

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Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning 7

Fig. 7 Pictures of pitting wear of six gears.

Fig. 8 Raw gear vibration signal under different pitting failure condition.

be seen that for gears with only intermediate tooth pitting,
0.16% of Condition (1) (normal gears) are misjudged as Con-
dition (2) (gears with 10% pitting). 0.64% of gear in Condition
(2) was mistaken for Condition (3) (gear with 30% pitting).
Similarly, Condition (3) is 0.32% misjudged as the gear of
the Condition (2). For Condition (5) and Condition (6), gears
with intermediate tooth 50% pitting and the adjacent upper
and lower teeth also with pitting failure, the probability of mis-
judging each other are 1.56% and 1.24% respectively. In gen-
eral, the misjudged gears are mainly concentrated on the gears
that are close to their pitting characteristics. This may be
because the gear pitting is relatively close, resulting in similar
original vibration signals.
Fig. 11 shows the clusters of the features in a three-
dimensional space. The numerical values are the outputs
obtained by using the ADSAE method proposed in this paper
to pass the test to the trained encoder. According to Section 3
of this paper, the number of neurons in the middle layer of the
trained autoencoder was 96. In order to be able to display the
features in the three-dimensional plane, the number of neurons
in the middle of the autoencoder hidden layer was gradually
reduced to 3 to carry out dimensionality reduction. The num-
ber of neurons in each layer of the ADSAE network was 96-
48-24-12-6-3-6-12-24-48-96. The positions of the gears with
different pitting degrees are different in the three-dimensional
visualization. It is showing a certain change trend with the
change of the degree of pitting of the gears. The numbers on
each color in the figure are the digital status labels for the dif-
ferent gears in Table 2. It can be seen from Table 2 that the
greater the number, the more serious degree of gear pitting
fault. As can be seen from Fig. 11, the normal gear of the con-
dition (1) has a large value in the x-axis direction, the data
coordinate in the y-axis direction is relatively large, and the
coordinate value in the z-axis direction is small. As the degree
of pitting corrosion increases, the coordinate value in the x-
axis direction gradually decreases, and the coordinate value

Please cite this article in press as: LI X et al. Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning, Chin J Aeronaut (2019), https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2019.04.018
8 X. LI et al.

Fig. 9 Gear vibration signals.

Table 3 Pseudo code for gear pitting fault detection based on Table 5 Comparison of the ADSAE algorithm with other
sparse autoencoder. deep learning methods.
Autoencoder based gear pitting detection algorithm Accuracy Training set Validation set Testing set
Input: Normal gear dataset X, Pitting gear dataset xðiÞ , i = 1,2. . ., ADSAE 0.9931 0.9925 0.9914
N, threshold a SAE 0.7230 0.6638 0.6642
Output: reconstruction errork x  x ^k CNN 0.8217 0.7876 0.7281
U, h train a autoencoder using the normal gear dataset X LSTM 0.7204 0.6144 0.6153
for i = l to N do
   GRU 0.7125 0.6847 0.6333
reconstruction error(i) = k xðiÞ  gh f/ xðiÞ k
if reconstruction error(i) < a then
xðiÞ is a normal gear
else
xðiÞ is a pitting gear
end if
end for

Table 4 Accuracy comparison between 800 r/min under

different loads.
Condition Training set Validation set Testing set
800 r/min _100 Nm 0.9945 0.9915 0.9918
800 r/min _200 Nm 0.9965 0.9937 0.9935
800 r/min _300 Nm 0.9942 0.9936 0.9933
800 r/min _400 Nm 0.9931 0.9925 0.9914
800 r/min _500 Nm 0.9920 0.9917 0.9915

Fig. 10 Confusion matrix by the presented algorithm for the

in the y-axis direction also gradually decreases. The coordinate
value increases continuously with the increase of the degree of
gear pitting failure in the z-axis direction. The contrast in the z-
axis direction is most pronounced. Gear pitting with larger z-
axis values must be more severe than gear pitting wear with
smaller z-axis values. Gear pitting faults for the condition (6)
testing set.
generally have smaller x and y-axis coordinate values and have
larger z-axis coordinate value. The gear pitting fault in the
middle is also consistent with the overall trend.

Please cite this article in press as: LI X et al. Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning, Chin J Aeronaut (2019), https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2019.04.018
Semi-supervised gear fault diagnosis using raw vibration signal based on deep learning
Fig. 11 Visualization of three-dimensional features of gear
pitting conditions.
The future research will include extending the developed
ADSAE algorithm to diagnosis of other types of mechanical
component faults, for example, bearing and engine faults.
5. Conclusions
In this paper, an ADSAE algorithm for gear pitting fault diag-
nosis was presented. This algorithm uses SAE and data shift-
ing methods to enhance the semi-unsupervised learning.
Therefore, the gear pitting fault can be effectively detected.
The method presented in this paper can effectively expand
small training samples, and use the raw vibration signals and
semi-supervised learning method to detect the pitting faults
of the gear. The effectiveness of the proposed method was
tested by experiments. The results of the gear pitting fault
detection rate exceeded 99%. By comparing it with other deep
learning methods, the accuracy of the ADSAE method is the
highest, which can meet the classification and detection
requirements for gears with different pitting conditions.
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the Natural Science Foundation
of China (No. 51675089).
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