Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Adversarial Transfer Learning for Imbalanced Samples of Portal Crane Drive Motor

Due to their unique structural design, portal cranes have been extensively utilized in bulk cargo and container terminals. The bearing fault of their drive motors is a critical issue that significantly impacts their operational efficiency. Moreover, the problem of imbalanced fault samples has a more pronounced influence on the application of novel fault diagnosis methods. To address this, the paper presents a new method called bidirectional gated recurrent domain adversarial transfer learning (BRDATL), specifically designed for imbalanced samples from portal cranes’ drive motor bearings. Initially, a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) is used as a feature extractor within the network to comprehensively extract features from both source and target domains. Building on this, a new Correlation Maximum Mean Discrepancy (CAMMD) method, integrating both Correlation Alignment (CORAL) and Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), is proposed to guide the feature generator in providing domain-invariant features. Considering the real-time data characteristics of portal crane drive motor bearings, we adjusted the CWRU and XJTU-SY bearing datasets and conducted comparative experiments. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the proposed method is up to 99.5%, which is obviously higher than other methods. The presented fault diagnosis model provides a practical and theoretical framework for diagnosing faults in portal cranes’ field operation environments.