Study on a Fault Diagnosis Method for Heterogeneous Chiller Units Based on Transfer Learning

As the core refrigeration equipment in cooling systems, the operational state of chiller units is crucial for ship support, equipment cooling, and mission stability. However, because of their sensitivity and the complexity of operating environments, obtaining large volumes of complete, fault-labeled data is difficult in practical engineering appli-cations. This limitation makes it challenging for traditional data-driven approaches to deliver accurate fault diagnoses. Furthermore, data collected from different devices or under varying operating conditions often differ significantly in both feature dimensions and distributions, i.e., data heterogeneity, which further complicates model transfer. To address these challenges, this study proposes a deep transfer learning–based fault di-agnosis method designed to leverage abundant knowledge from the source domain while adaptively learning features of the target domain. Given the persistent difficulties in collecting sufficient high-quality labeled fault data, traditional data-driven models continue to face restricted diagnostic performance on target equipment. At the same time, data heterogeneity across devices or operating conditions intensifies the challenge of cross-domain knowledge transfer. To overcome these issues, this study develops a heterogeneous transfer learning method that integrates a dual-channel autoencoder, domain adversarial training, and pseudo-label self-training. This combination enables precise small-sample knowledge transfer from the source to the target domain. Specifi-cally, the dual-channel autoencoder is first applied to align heterogeneous feature di-mensions. Then, a Gradient Reversal Layer (GRL) and a domain discriminator are in-troduced to extract domain-invariant features. In parallel, high-confidence pseu-do-labeled samples from the target domain are incorporated into joint training to im-prove generalization and robustness. Experimental results confirm that the method achieves high fault diagnosis accuracy in typical industrial application scenarios, ena-bling effective identification of common faults in various types of chiller units under conventional operating conditions, the proposed method achieves higher accuracy and F1-scores in multi-class fault diagnosis tasks compared with both traditional approaches and existing transfer learning methods. These findings provide a novel perspective for advancing the intelligent operation and maintenance of chiller units.