Noise-Resilient Whitened Domain Adaptation for Intelligent Mechanical Fault Diagnosis Under Non-Stationary Sensor Signals

Intelligent mechanical fault diagnosis plays a key role in maintaining rotating machinery. Although data-driven unsupervised domain adaptation methods have achieved considerable progress, their industrial applications are often restricted by low-quality sensor data. Non-stationary vibration signals and background noise easily corrupt target pseudo-labels, while conventional methods focusing on global statistical matching usually neglect local structures, leading to confirmation bias under dynamic loads. To improve diagnostic reliability, we propose a Noise-Resilient Whitened Domain Adaptation (NRWDA) framework. To handle covariance fluctuations caused by changing working conditions, a Lipschitz-bounded Temporal Whitening (LTW) module is designed as a low-pass filter. An Entropy-guided Prototype Truncation (EPT) mechanism is adopted to discard ambiguous labels and better calibrate semantic centers. In addition, a Dispersion-Adaptive Contrastive Sharpening (DACS) strategy is introduced to dynamically adjust the contrastive temperature based on predictive dispersion, thus tightening decision boundaries. The proposed method is evaluated on CWRU, PU, and MFPT datasets. The PU dataset, featuring fluctuating loads and non-stationary signals, poses a strict test, yet our model maintains its stability even at a 0 dB SNR—a condition where standard approaches usually break down. During the P0→P3 transfer task involving substantial radial force variations, NRWDA secures a 72.36% accuracy and surpasses established baselines. These findings confirm that our technique successfully isolates dependable diagnostic features from corrupted sensor measurements within actual industrial settings.