Cross-Condition Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings Based on Time–Frequency Ridge Extraction and Uncertainty-Guided Distribution-Regularised Convolutional Wasserstein Autoencoder
Abstract
Highlights What are the main findings? A tacholess ridge extraction method enables robust rotational-frequency estimation under noise and multi-component interference. UDR-CWAE improves latent representation through MMD-based distribution regularisation. What are the implications of the main findings? Single-rotation-cycle samples reduce speed-induced structural inconsistency in vibration signals. Uncertainty-weighting strategy enhances training stability and cross-condition generalisation. Abstract Cross-condition fault diagnosis of rotating machinery remains challenging under variable speed and load because vibration signals have strong non-stationarity and exhibit distribution shifts across operating conditions. To address this problem, a tacholess diagnosis framework combining time–frequency ridge extraction with an uncertainty-guided distribution-regularised convolutional Wasserstein autoencoder (UDR-CWAE) is proposed. Firstly, instantaneous rotational frequency is estimated directly from vibration signals using harmonic-amplitude-based ridge initialisation, edge-constrained search, and cost-function-based tracking. Then, the estimated rotational frequency is integrated to construct single-rotation-cycle vibration samples, which are normalised to reduce the discrepancy of amplitude scale among samples. Finally, UDR-CWAE regularises the aggregated latent distribution using maximum mean discrepancy, while uncertainty weighting adaptively balances reconstruction, distribution-regularisation, and classification losses. Cross-condition experiments on the Ottawa bearing dataset and the SQI test-rig dataset achieved classification accuracies of 99.98% and 99.23%, respectively. These results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides accurate tacholess speed estimation and robust fault recognition under unseen rotational-frequency conditions.