Learning features from vibration signals for induction motor fault diagnosis

Aiming at automated and intelligent state monitoring of induction motors, which are an integral component of a broad spectrum of manufacturing machines, this paper presents a Deep Belief Network (DBN)-based approach to automatically extract relevant features from vibration signals that characterize the working condition of an induction motor. The DBN model employs a structure with stacked restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), and is trained by an efficient learning algorithm called greedy layer-wise training. Vibration signals are used as the input to the DBN, and the outputs from activation functions of the trained network are the features needed for fault diagnosis. Comparing to traditional feature extraction methods for induction motor fault diagnosis such as wavelet packet transform, the proposed method is able to learn features directly from the vibration signal to achieve comparable performance with high classification accuracy. Experiments conducted on a machine fault simulator have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method for induction motor fault diagnosis.