Digital twin-assisted dual transfer: A novel information-model adaptation method for rolling bearing fault diagnosis

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis is of great importance to the safety management of mechanical equipment. The scarcity of labelled fault data makes it difficult to adequately perform the training process of intelligent diagnosis models, and this will result in these intelligent models not being effectively and widely used in practice. Although some recent studies have verified that the addition of dynamic model response to the training process will greatly improve the ability of the model with low cost and high efficiency, it is still stuck in poor effect caused by large information distribution difference between dynamic model response and real measured data. Focusing on this issue, a digital twin-assisted dual transfer (DTa-DT) method with information and model adaptation was proposed for rolling bearing fault diagnosis. Different from the traditional digital-analogue driven transfer methods, the proposed DTa-DT aims to simultaneously synthesize data information transfer and feature model transfer together with domain transfer error minimization. In particular, it should be noted that the DTa-DT architecture consists of a dual transfer learning process, including digital twin-driven information transfer (DTd-IT) and digital-analogue-driven model transfer (DAd-MT), where the information is collaborated with the model to improve the integrated transfer diagnosis effect under sampling. On one aspect, with the employment of bearing dynamic model responses, DTd-IT is innovatively designed to establish the transfer of dynamic information and measured information. The information distribution difference between these twin data and real measured data is effetely adjusted with the introduced actual inference components, where the twin data with low information distribution difference can be well fusion generated by the information transfer digital twin (ITDT) model. On the other aspect, considering the truth that there are still small sample cases of real measured data and information distribution differences will affect the quality of the twin data, a digital-analogue driven model transfer (DAd-MT) method is further proposed, where the deep branch transfer network (DBTN) model with improved convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to achieve an accurate fault diagnosis effect with the help of digital twin data. Experiments and wear analysis verified that the proposed DTa-DT can significantly reduce the distribution difference between the dynamic model response and the real measured data, thus achieving low-cost and efficient rolling bearing transfer diagnosis compared to other ten state-of-the-art deep learning models. It can be predicted that the proposed dual transfer architecture provides more opportunities for the practical application of intelligent fault diagnosis under small sample sizes.