BearingFM: Towards a foundation model for bearing fault diagnosis by domain knowledge and contrastive learning

Monitoring bearing failures in production equipment can effectively prevent finished product quality issues and unplanned factory downtime, thereby reducing supply chain uncertainties and risk. Therefore, monitoring bearing failures in production equipment is important for improving supply chain sustainability. Due to the generalization limitations of neural network models, specific models must be trained for specific tasks. However, in real industrial scenarios, there is a severe lack of labeled samples, making it difficult to deploy fault diagnosis models across massive amounts of equipment in workshops. In order to solve the above issue, this paper proposes a cloud-edge-end collaborative semi-supervised learning framework, which provides multi-level computing power and data support for building a foundation model. A data augmentation method based on the bearing fault mechanism is proposed, which effectively preserves the inherent essential characteristics in vibration signals by normalizing frequency and adding noise in specific frequency bands. A novel contrastive learning model is designed, which narrows the distances between positive samples and widens the distances between negative samples in the high-dimensional space through cross comparisons in the time dimension and knowledge dimension, thereby extracting the most essential characteristics from the unlabeled signals. Multiple sets of experiments conducted on four datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an approximately 98% fault classification accuracy with only 1.2% labeled samples.