Bearing Single-Source Domain Generalization Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Adaptive Frequency-Domain Augmentation and Unsupervised Contrastive Learning

Cross-domain distribution shifts severely degrade the diagnostic performance of rolling bearing models under unseen variable operating scenarios. Single-source domain generalization (SDG) builds fault diagnosis models using only single-source vibration data, which fits the practical limitations of industrial data collection. Existing contrastive learning methods adopt uniform spectral perturbations for data augmentation, which easily corrupt fault harmonic characteristics and require massive, labeled training samples. To tackle these drawbacks, this paper proposes an unsupervised contrastive learning framework named FDACL. An adaptive frequency-domain augmentation (AFA) module equipped with learnable weights is designed to separate fault-critical frequency bands from noise components. Differentiated amplitude perturbations are applied to two categories of spectral signals to generate diverse pseudo-samples while retaining intrinsic fault information. A shared encoder is trained with combined InfoNCE contrast loss and classification loss to learn domain-invariant fault representations. Validations are carried out on three datasets, namely Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Paderborn University (PU), and the industrial CRRC Qingdao Sifang railway wheelset bearing dataset acquired from physical test benches. FDACL achieves average cross-speed diagnostic accuracies of 92.68% and 77.85% on CWRU and PU, respectively, and maintains competitive performance on the Qingdao Sifang industrial dataset. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 4.23–8.71% across all SDG transfer tasks. Ablation experiments and hyperparameter analysis verify the efficacy of the AFA module and contrastive learning scheme, providing an unsupervised diagnostic approach for railway bearings under unknown working conditions.