Cross-Condition Fault Diagnosis of Crane Slewing Bearings Based on a Lightweight Domain-Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network

Abstract

Cross-condition fault identification for crane slewing bearings is difficult because low rotational speed, heavy loading, and operating-condition variation jointly weaken fault-induced impulses and alter the distribution of monitoring data. In addition, vibration and acoustic emission signals describe different aspects of bearing degradation, making fixed multi-sensor fusion insufficient when sensor sensitivity changes across fault states. This study proposes a Lightweight Domain-Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (LDAGCN) for cross-condition diagnosis. The model uses six vibration channels and one acoustic emission channel as synchronized heterogeneous inputs. Two compact one-dimensional encoders first learn modality-specific temporal representations, after which a feature-wise gate determines the relative contribution of each sensing modality. The fused embeddings in every mini-batch are regarded as graph nodes, and a sparse sample graph is reconstructed from Top-k cosine similarities. Multi-receptive-field graph convolution then aggregates one-hop and higher-order neighborhood information, while a residual connection limits excessive modification of the original fused features. To reduce the discrepancy between operating conditions, the training objective combines source-domain classification, adversarial domain discrimination, maximum mean discrepancy, and supervision from a small labeled target-domain adaptation subset. Experiments were carried out on a dedicated crane slewing-bearing test rig containing normal, inner-race fault, outer-race fault, and B1 localized-fault states. On the target-condition test set, LDAGCN achieved an accuracy of 97.22%, a Macro-F1 score of 97.21%, a Macro-Precision of 97.37%, and a Macro-Recall of 97.22%. The proposed model also outperformed 1D-CNN, ResNet1D, CNN-LSTM, DANN, MMD-DAN, and DeepCORAL under the same data partition. The confusion matrix and t-SNE projection indicate that the learned representation reduces the source–target distribution gap while retaining fault-class separation. The ablation results further indicate that the acoustic emission information, gated fusion, graph-based association learning, and domain adaptation complement each other in terms of the final diagnostic performance, while maintaining a lightweight architecture that is suitable for practical monitoring.