Gear pitting level diagnosis using vibration signals with an improved inception structure

Gear pitting fault is common in mechanical devices. At present, most of the gear pitting fault detection methods are based on the manual extraction of the frequency domain features from vibration signals. This paper presents a method for gear pitting fault level diagnosis using vibration signals with an improved inception network. The presented method directly applies to the vibration signals to automatically extract features and diagnose the level of the gear pitting fault using deep learning. The presented method has been validated with vibration data collected for 7 gear pitting conditions from gear pitting fault tests. The validation results have shown that the presented method can effectively classify the levels of the gear pitting faults. In comparison with traditional convolutional neural network, the diagnosis accuracy has been significantly improved with the presented method.