Multi-Classifier Open Adversarial Network for Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis in Wind Turbine Generator Systems
Rolling bearings in wind turbine generator systems operate under variable speed and load conditions that induce significant data distribution shifts between training and field data, while unknown fault modes absent from the source domain are frequently misclassified as known classes. This study proposes a multi-classifier open adversarial network (MCOAN) for open-set fault diagnosis. Within an adversarial domain adaptation framework, a K-way classifier and an additional K+1-way one-vs-all classifier independently estimate target-sample similarity to the source domain. These similarity scores drive a dynamic weighting mechanism that adaptively reweights target samples during open-set adversarial training and supplies per-sample dynamic thresholds for known/unknown discrimination, thereby promoting cross-domain alignment of shared-class features while suppressing negative transfer from unknown samples. A non-adversarial domain classifier is introduced to stabilize dynamic weight estimation. Validation on two datasets demonstrates high-precision shared-class distribution alignment and unknown-class recognition with favorable robustness. The method removes reliance on empirically preset thresholds that plague conventional open-set back-propagation approaches, where a fixed threshold of 0.5 in the binary cross-entropy adversarial loss provides no per-sample adaptivity. By coupling K-way and K+1-way similarity estimates, MCOAN achieves simultaneous known-class alignment and unknown-class separation without prior knowledge of the unknown-class cardinality, addressing a persistent bottleneck in wind turbine drivetrain condition monitoring where unanticipated bearing failure modes emerge under field conditions.