An intelligent fault diagnosis method based on domain adaptation for rolling bearings under variable load conditions

To identify rolling bearing faults under variable load conditions, a method named DISA-KNN is proposed in this paper, which is based on the strategy of feature extraction-domain adaptation-classification. To be specific, the time-domain and frequency-domain indicators are used for feature extraction. Discriminative and domain invariant subspace alignment (DISA) is used to minimize the data distributions' discrepancies between the training data (source domain) and testing data (target domain). K-nearest neighbor (KNN) is applied to identify rolling bearing faults. DISA-KNN's validation is proved by the experimental signal collected under different load conditions. The identification accuracies obtained by the DISA-KNN method are more than 90% on four datasets, including one dataset with 99.5% accuracy. The strength of the proposed method is further highlighted by comparisons with the other 8 methods. These results reveal that the proposed method is promising for the rolling bearing fault diagnosis in real rotating machinery.