A Multi-Adversarial Joint Distribution Adaptation Method for Bearing Fault Diagnosis under Variable Working Conditions

Abstract

Deep network fault diagnosis requires a lot of labeled data and assumes identical data distributions for training and testing. In industry, varying equipment conditions lead to different data distributions, making it challenging to maintain consistent fault diagnosis performance across conditions. To this end, this paper designs a transfer learning model named the multi-adversarial joint distribution adaptation network (MAJDAN) to achieve effective fault diagnosis across operating conditions. MAJDAN uses a one-dimensional lightweight convolutional neural network (1DLCNN) to directly extract features from the original bearing vibration signal. Combining the distance-based domain-adaptive method, maximum mean difference (MMD), with the multi-adversarial network will simultaneously reduce the conditional and marginal distribution differences between the domains. As a result, MAJDAN can efficiently acquire domain-invariant feature information, addressing the challenge of cross-domain bearing fault diagnosis. The effectiveness of the model was verified based on two sets of different bearing vibration signals, and one-to-one and one-to-many working condition migration task experiments were carried out. Simultaneously, various levels of noise were introduced to the signal to enable analysis and comparison. The findings demonstrate that the suggested approach achieves exceptional diagnostic accuracy and exhibits robustness.