Unsupervised fault diagnosis of wind turbine bearing via a deep residual deformable convolution network based on subdomain adaptation under time-varying speeds

Recent years have seen the rapid development and marvelous achievement of deep learning-based fault diagnosis (FD) methods which assume that training data and testing data have the same distribution. However, in real FD of wind turbine bearing (WTB), the particularity of time-varying speeds makes a huge difference in the distribution of training data and testing data, greatly increasing the difficulty of FD. Accordingly, in this paper, a novel deep residual deformable subdomain adaptation framework is proposed for cross-domain failure diagnosis of WTB under time-varying speeds. In the proposed approach, the traditional residual network is improved by using a deformable convolution module to replace plain counterparts, which can make the feature representation of an object adapt its configuration and enhance the ability of the model to extract transferable features. Moreover, the popular FD model based on domain adversarial neural nets and global maximum mean discrepancy is improved by removing the adversarial training mechanism and employing a local maximum mean discrepancy to align the distributions of the identical fault type in different domains, making the diagnostic model simpler and more efficient. Two experimental cases under time-varying speeds are conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed approach and the results indicate that this method can utilize the knowledge in the source domain to diagnose the fault in the target domain. Compared with the existing methods, the diagnosis accuracy and efficiency are significantly improved, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential applications in fault transfer diagnosis of wind turbine bearing.