Rolling bearings are critical components in industrial machinery, and their failures can lead to equipment downtime or safety hazards, making accurate fault diagnosis vital. While data-driven intelligent methods perform well with sufficient labeled data, acquiring large-scale fault data in real-world scenarios remains challenging. To address this issue, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis method combining finite element simulation and deep domain adaptation transfer learning. First, a finite element model of rolling bearings under normal, outer race, inner race, and rolling element fault conditions is developed, and ANSYS/LS-DYNA simulates motion to generate labeled synthetic fault data. The model’s reliability is validated through time-domain, frequency-domain, and time-frequency analyses. A lightweight 1D convolutional neural network (1D CNN) is then designed for fault diagnosis. When trained solely on simulated data, the model achieves only 61.4% accuracy on real data due to domain discrepancies. To bridge this gap, a transfer learning approach integrating generative adversarial networks (GANs) and multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MK-MMD) is proposed: GANs synthesize data resembling real distributions, while MK-MMD minimizes domain shifts between simulated and actual data. This improves the model’s accuracy to 93.8% on real fault datasets. error map expose serious “illusion” risks, making it unsuitable for precise quantitative analysis.
Domain Adaptation from Simulation to Reality: A GAN- and MK-MMD-Based Transfer Learning Approach for Bearing Fault Diagnosis
