Causal Disentanglement: A Generalized Bearing Fault Diagnostic Framework in Continuous Degradation Mode

In recent years, the identification of out-of-distribution faults has become a hot topic in the field of intelligent diagnosis. Existing researches usually adopt domain adaptation methods to complete the generalization of diagnostic knowledge with the aid of target domain data, but the acquisition of fault samples in real industries is extremely time-consuming and costly. Moreover, most researches focus on samples with fixed fault levels, ignoring the fact that system degradation is a continuous process. In response to the above intractable problems, this article proposed a causal disentanglement network (CDN) to realize cross-machine knowledge generalization and continuous degradation mode diagnosis. In CDN, multitask instance normalization and batch normalization structure was proposed to learn task-specific knowledge and enhance the informativeness of the extracted features. On this basis, a causal disentanglement loss was proposed, which minimized the mutual information of features between subtask structures and captured the causal invariant fault information for better generalization. The experimental results proved the superiority and generalization ability of CDN, and the visualization results proved the performance of CDN in causality mining.