Pre-Processing Method to Improve Cross-Domain Fault Diagnosis for Bearing

Models trained with one system fail to identify other systems accurately because of domain shifts. To perform domain adaptation, numerous studies have been conducted in many fields and have successfully aligned different domains into one domain. The domain shift problem is caused by the difference of distributions between two domains, which is solved by reducing this difference. Source domain data are labeled and used for training the models to extract the features while the target domain data are unlabeled or partially labeled and only used for aligning. Bearings play important roles in rotating machines, so many artificial intelligent models have been developed to diagnose bearings. Bearing diagnosis has also faced a domain shift problem due to various operating conditions such as experimental environment, number of balls, degree of defects, and rotational speed. Cross-domain fault diagnosis has been successfully performed when the systems are the same but operating conditions are different. However, the results are poor when diagnosing different bearing systems because the characteristics of the signals such as specific frequencies depend on the specifications. In this paper, the pre-processing method was used for improving the diagnosis without prior knowledge such as fault frequencies. The signals were first transformed to a common pattern space before entering the models. To develop and to validate the proposed method for different domains, vibration signals measured from two ball-bearing systems (Case Western Reserve University datasets and Paderborn University datasets) were used. One dimensional CNN models were utilized for verification of the proposed method and the results of the models using raw datasets and pre-processed datasets were compared. Even though each of the ball-bearing systems have their own specifications, using the proposed method was very helpful for domain adaptation, and cross-domain fault diagnosis was performed with high accuracy.