Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings driven by multi-channel data fusion and feature fusion under time-varying speed conditions

Abstract Bearings, as the core component for power transmission, are crucial in ensuring the safe and reliable operation of equipment. However, the fault information contained in a single-channel vibration signal is inherently limited. Additionally, under time-varying speed conditions, features are prone to drift, and the cross-domain diagnostic performance of most traditional domain adaptation (DA) models may drop dramatically. To solve the above problems and enhance the ability of DA models in extracting domain invariant features, this paper introduces a Multi-channel data fusion and Attention-guided Multi-feature Fusion-driven Center-aligned Network (MAMC). Initially, a multi-channel time-frequency information fusion strategy based on wavelet transform is constructed to achieve a comprehensive fusion of multi-channel data, thereby obtaining richer fault feature representations. Subsequently, a multi-branch feature fusion network, integrated with an attention mechanism, is devised to capture significant features across various dimensions and scales, resulting in more comprehensive and representative fault features. Finally, a novel Center-Aligned Domain Adaptation method (CADA) is proposed based on domain adversarial methods and center loss. By minimizing the distance between deep domain invariant features and trainable common class centers, the issue of domain shift between data is effectively alleviated, and the cross-domain diagnostic performance of DA models under the time-varying speed conditions is improved. The experimental results indicate that the MAMC method exhibits superior performance on both bearing datasets and is a promising approach for cross-domain intelligent fault diagnosis.