Recent Advancement of Deep Learning Applications to Machine Condition Monitoring Part 1: A Critical Review

With the huge success of applying deep learning (DL) methodologies to image recognition and natural language processing in recent years, researchers are now keen to use them in the machine condition monitoring (MCM) context. There are numerous papers in applying various DL techniques, such as auto-encoder, restricted Boltzmann machine, convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network, etc., to MCM problems ranging from component-level condition monitoring (machine tool wear prediction, bearing fault diagnosis and classification and hydraulic pump fault diagnosis) to system-level health management (aircraft and spacecraft diagnosis). In this paper, we give a brief overview in the area of DL for MCM with a focus on reviewing the most recent papers published since 2019. In Part 1, we present some critical views regarding whether any breakthrough has been achieved from an MCM domain expert perspective, with the main conclusion that DL has great potential for MCM applications, and a major breakthrough could come soon since the shortfalls lie more in data than in the DL methodologies. Our overall impression is that (a) DL models are not really showing their great potentials with only a small training data; (b) faulty-condition data is hard to come by for training DL, but normal condition data is abundant, so anomaly detection makes more sense; (c) applying DL only to the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) bearing fault dataset is not sufficient for real world industrial applications as it was from a very simple test rig, and applying DL to data from complex systems like helicopter gearbox data may deliver much more convincing results. In Part 2, we enhance the main conclusion of the critical review with supplement views and a case study on analysing Bell-206B helicopter main gearbox planet bearing failure data using some traditional MCM techniques in contrast to applying the long short-term memory (LSTM) DL method. We can conclude from the case study that the DL-based methods are not necessarily always superior to the traditional MCM techniques for dataset from moderately complex machinery.