Failure Mechanism Information-Assisted Multi-Domain Adversarial Transfer Fault Diagnosis Model for Rolling Bearings under Variable Operating Conditions

Abstract

Deep transfer learning tackles the challenge of fault diagnosis in rolling bearings across variable operating conditions, which is pivotal for intelligent bearing health management. Traditional transfer learning may not be able to adapt to the specific characteristics of the target domain, especially in the case of variable working conditions or lack of annotated data for the target domain. This may lead to unstable training results or negative transfer of the neural network. This paper proposes a new method for enhancing unsupervised domain adaptation in bearing fault diagnosis, aimed at providing robust fault diagnosis for rolling bearings under varying operating conditions. It incorporates bearing fault finite element simulation data into the domain adversarial network, guiding adversarial training using fault evolution mechanisms. The algorithm establishes global and subdomain classifiers, with simulation signals replacing label predictions for target data in the subdomain, ensuring minimal information transfer. By reconstructing the loss function, we can extract the common features of the same type bearing under different conditions and enhance the domain antagonism robustness. The proposed method is validated using two sets of testbed data as target domains. The results demonstrate that the method can adequately adapt the deep feature distributions of the model and experimental domains, thereby improving the accuracy of fault diagnosis in unsupervised cross-domain scenarios.