EMD-based fault diagnosis for abnormal clearance between contacting components in a diesel engine

The accuracy of fault diagnostic systems for diesel engine-type generators relies on a comparison of the currently extracted sensory features with those captured during normal operation or the so-called "baseline." However, the baseline is not easily obtained without the required expertise. Even worse, in an attempt to save costs, many of the diesel engine generators in manufacturing plants are second hand or have been purchased from unknown suppliers, meaning that the baseline is unknown. In this paper, a novel vibration-based fault diagnostic method is developed to identify the vital components of a diesel engine that have abnormal clearance. The advantage of this method is that it does not require the comparison of current operating parameters to those collected as the baseline. First, the nominal baseline is obtained via theoretical modeling rather than being actually captured from the sensory signals in a healthy condition. The abnormal clearance is then determined by inspecting the timing of impacts created by the components that had abnormal clearance during operation. To detect the timing of these impacts from vibration signals accurately, soft-re-sampling and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) techniques are employed. These techniques have integrated with our proposed ranged angle (RA) analysis to form a new ranged angle-empirical mode decomposition method (RA-EMD). To verify the effectiveness of the RA-EMD in detecting the impacts and their times of occurrence, their induced vibrations are collected from a series of generators under normal and faulty engine conditions. The results show that this method is capable of extracting the impacts induced by vibrations and is able to determine their times of occurrence accurately even when the impacts have been overwhelmed by other unrelated vibration signals. With the help of the RA-EMD, clearance-related faults, such as incorrect open and closed valve events, worn piston rings and liners, etc., become detectable even without the comparison to the baseline. Hence, proper remedies can be applied to defective diesel engines to ensure that valuable fuel is not wasted due to the incorrect timing of combustion as well as unexpected fatal breakdown, which may cause loss of production or even human casualties, can be minimized. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.