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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Mech. Eng.

Sec. Mechatronics

Research on Intelligent Diagnosis of Mechanical Rolling Bearing Faults through Transfer Learning

Provisionally accepted
  • Chongqing Vocational Institute of Safety and Technology, Chongqing, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

This article proposes a fault diagnosis algorithm for mechanical rolling bearings based on transfer learning. The proposed algorithm enhances the traditional conventional convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm by introducing a domain category judgment module and an inter-domain conditional probability distribution difference module, thereby achieving transfer learning between source domain samples and target domain samples. Simulation experiments were performed. On a PT100 bearing fault simulation test platform, vibration signals of bearings were collected in cases of normal operation, inner race faults, outer race faults, and ball faults at motor speeds of 1,000, 1,500, and 2,000 r/min. The diagnostic performance of support vector machine (SVM), back-propagation neural network (BPNN), and the proposed algorithm was evaluated in operating condition transfer tasks. Moreover, ablation experiments were conducted. It was found that the proposed algorithm could effectively and accurately identify bearing faults in the face of changes in operating conditions. Both the domain category judgment module and the inter-domain conditional probability distribution difference could effectively achieve transfer learning of the diagnostic model.

Keywords: Convolutional Neural Network, Electrical control design, Fault diagnosis, Rolling bearing, Transfer Learning

Received: 12 Nov 2025; Accepted: 02 Feb 2026.

Copyright: © 2026 Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Yougang Zhang

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