CTNet: A data-driven time-frequency technique for wind turbines fault diagnosis under time-varying speeds

Nonstationary fault signals collected from wind turbine planetary gearboxes and bearings often exhibit close-spaced instantaneous frequencies (IFs), or even crossed IFs, bringing challenges for existing time-frequency analysis (TFA) methods. To address the issue, a data-driven TFA technique, termed CTNet is developed. The CTNet is a novel model that combines a fully convolutional auto-encoder network with the convolutional block attention module (CBAM). In the CTNet, the encoder layer is first designed to extract coarse features of the time-frequency representation (TFR) calculated by the general linear Chirplet transform (GLCT); second, the decoder layer is combined to restore and conserve details of the key time-frequency features; third, the skip connections are designed to accelerate training by linking extracted and reconstructed features; finally, the CBAM is introduced to adaptively explore channel and spatial relationships of the TFR, focusing more on close-spaced or crossed frequency features, and effectively reconstruct the TFR. The effectiveness of the CTNet is validated by numerical signals with close-spaced or crossed IFs, and real-world signals of wind turbine planetary gearbox and bearings. Comparison analysis with state-of-the-art TFA methods shows that the CTNet has high time-frequency resolution in characterizing nonstationary signals and a much better ability to detect wind turbine faults.