Investigation of engine fault diagnosis using discrete wavelet transform and neural network

An investigation of a fault diagnostic technique for internal combustion engines using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and neural network is presented in this paper. Generally, sound emission signal serves as a promising alternative to the condition monitoring and fault diagnosis in rotating machinery when the vibration signal is not available. Most of the conventional fault diagnosis techniques using sound emission and vibration signals are based on analyzing the signal amplitude in the time or frequency domain. Meanwhile, the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) technique was developed for obtaining both time-domain and frequency-domain information. Unfortunately, the CWT technique is often operated over a longer computing time. In the present study, a DWT technique which is combined with a feature selection of energy spectrum and fault classification using neural network for analyzing fault signal is proposed for improving the shortcomings without losing its original property. The features of the sound emission signal at different resolution levels are extracted by multi-resolution analysis and Parseval’s theorem Gaing, Z. L. (2004). Wavelet-based neural network for power disturbance recognition and classification. IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery 19, 1560–1568]. The algorithm is obtained from previous work by Daubechies Daubechies, I. (1988). Orthonormal bases of compactly supported wavelets. Communication on Pure and Applied Mathematics 41, 909–996.], the“db4”, “db8” and “db20” wavelet functions are adopted to perform the proposed DWT technique. Then, these features are used for fault recognition using a neural network. The experimental results indicated that the proposed system using the sound emission signal is effective and can be used for fault diagnosis of various engine operating conditions.