Performance Prediction of the Gearbox Elastic Support Structure Based on Multi-Task Learning

The gearbox, as an important transmission component in wind turbines, connects the blades to the generator and is responsible for converting wind energy into mechanical energy and transmitting it to the generator. Its ability to reduce vibrations directly affects the operational lifespan of the wind turbine. When designing the gearbox’s elastic support structure, it is essential to evaluate how the design parameters influence various performance metrics. Neural networks offer a powerful means of capturing and interpreting the intricate associations linking structural parameters with performance metrics. However, conventional neural networks are usually optimized for a single task, failing to fully account for task differences and shared information. This can lead to task conflicts or insufficient feature modeling, which in turn affects the learning efficiency of inter-task correlations. Furthermore, physical experiments are costly and provide limited training, making it difficult to meet the large-scale dataset requirements for neural network training. To address the high cost and limited scalability of traditional physical testing for gearbox rubber damping structures, in this study, we propose a low-cost performance prediction method that replaces expensive experiments with simulation-driven dataset generation. An optimal Latin hypercube sampling technique is employed to generate high-quality data at minimal cost. On this basis, a multi-task prediction model called multi-gate mixture-of-experts with LSTM (PLE-LSTM) is constructed. The adaptive gating mechanism, hierarchical nonlinear transformation, and effective capture of temporal dynamics in the LSTM significantly enhance the model’s ability to model complex nonlinear patterns. During training, a dynamic weighting strategy named GradNorm is utilized to counteract issues like the early stabilization in multi-task loss convergence and the uneven minimization of loss values. Finally, ablation experiments conducted on different datasets validate the effectiveness of this approach, with experimental results demonstrating its success.