Many domain adaptation (DA) models have been explored for fault transfer diagnosis. However, their successes completely rely on the availability of target-domain samples during the training process. As target domain is usually unseen, the domain-adaptation-based diagnostic models cannot meet the requirement of real-time diagnosis in actual engineering. To achieve the domain confusion in the actual diagnosis scenario, a novel relationship transfer (RT) diagnosis framework is first proposed, which can indirectly measure and reduce the distribution discrepancy between the source domain and unseen target domain. Based on the proposed RT framework, a new domain generalization transfer method, called relationship transfer domain generalization network (RTDGN) is constructed. RTDGN is divided into two phases including task-irrelevant domain adaptation (TIDA) and task-relevant domain generalization (TRDG). In the TIDA phase, a DA adversarial network with several domain discriminators is built to enhance the domain confusion of RT framework. Furthermore, to bring the adversarial network a more general domain confusion ability, a new inverse entropy loss is designed. In the TRDG phase, a residual fusion classifier is constructed to improve the generalization ability of fault classifier. Finally, the experimental results on the wind turbine planetary gearbox dataset and bearing dataset verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposedRTDGN.

Many transfer learning methods have been proposed to implement fault transfer diagnosis, and their loss functions are usually composed of task-related losses, distribution distance losses, and correlation regularization losses. The intrinsic parameters and trade-off parameters between losses, however, need to be tuned according to the specific diagnosis tasks; thus, the generalization abilities of these methods in multiple tasks are limited. Besides, the alignment goal of most domain adaptation (DA) mechanisms dynamically changes during the training process, which will result in loss oscillation, slow convergence and poor robustness. To overcome the above-mentioned issues, a novel and simple transfer learning diagnosis method named adaptive intermediate class-wise distribution alignment (AICDA) model is proposed, and it is established via the proposed AICDA mechanism, dynamic intermediate alignment (DIA) adaptive layer and AdaSoftmax loss. The AICDA mechanism develops an adaptive intermediate distribution as the alignment goal of multiple source domains and target domains, and it can simultaneously align the global and class-wise distributions of these domains. The DIA layer is designed to adaptively achieve domain confusion without the distribution distance loss and the correlation regularization loss. Meanwhile, to ensure the classification performance of the AICDA mechanism, AdaSoftmax loss is proposed for boosting the separability of Softmax loss. Finally, in order to evaluate the effectiveness and universality of the AICDA diagnosis model to the most degree, various multisource mixed fault transfer diagnosis tasks of wind turbine planetary gearboxes, including DA and domain generalization (DG), are implemented, and the experimental results indicate that our proposed AICDA model has a higher diagnosis accuracy and a stronger generalization ability than other state-of-the-art transfer learning methods.