A Two-Stage Transfer Adversarial Network for Intelligent Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery with Multiple New Faults

Recently, deep transfer learning based intelligent fault diagnosis has been widely investigated, and the tasks that source and target domains share the same fault categories have been well addressed. However, due to complexity and uncertainty of mechanical equipment, unknown new faults may occur unexpectedly. This problem has received less attention in the current research, which seriously limited the application of deep transfer learning. In this paper, a two-stage transfer adversarial network (TSTAN) is proposed for multiple new faults detection of rotating machinery. First, a novel deep transfer learning model is constructed based on adversarial learning strategy, which can effectively separate multiple unlabeled new fault types from labeled known ones. Second, an unsupervised convolutional auto-encoders model with silhouette coefficient is built to recognize the number of new fault types. Extensive experiments on a gearbox dataset validate the practicability of the proposed scheme. The results suggest that it is promising to address fault diagnosis transfer tasks in which the multiple new faults occur in the target domain, which greatly expand the application of deep transfer learning.