A Hybrid Generalization Network for Intelligent Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery under Unseen Working Conditions

The data-driven methods in machinery fault diagnosis have become increasingly popular in the past two decades. However, the wide applications of this scheme are generally compromised in real-world conditions because of the discrepancy between the training data and testing data. Although the recently emerging transfer fault diagnosis can learn transferable features from relevant source data and adapt the diagnostic model to the target data, these methods still only work on the target domain with a priori data distribution. The generalization capability of the transferred model cannot be guaranteed for unseen domains. Since the working conditions of machinery are varying during operation, the generalization capability of the diagnosis methods is crucial in this case. To tackle this challenge, this article proposes a domain generalization-based hybrid diagnosis network for deploying to unseen working conditions. The main idea is to regularize the discriminant structure of the deep network with both intrinsic and extrinsic generalization objectives such that the diagnostic model can learn robust features and generalize to unseen domains. The triplet loss minimization of intrinsic multisource data is implemented to facilitate the intraclass compactness and the interclass separability at the class level, leading to a more generalized decision boundary. The extrinsic domain-level regularization is achieved by using adversarial training to further reduce the risk of overfitting. Extensive cross-domain diagnostic experiments on planetary gearbox demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.