Classification-Based Fuel Injection Fault Detection of a Trainset Diesel Engine Using Vibration Signature Analysis

Diesel engines are crucial components of trainsets. Automated fault detection of diesel engines can play an important role for increasing reliability of passenger trains. In this research, vibration-based fuel injection fault detection of a high-power 12-cylinder trainset diesel engine is studied. Vibration signals are analyzed in frequency and time-frequency domains to obtain possible patterns of faults. Fast Fourier transform (FFT) and wavelet packet transform (WPT) of vibration signals are used to extract several uncorrelated features. These features are chosen to increase the ability of classifiers to separate healthy and faulty engine sides, automatically. Different classification methods including multilayer perception (MLP), support vector machines (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), and local linear model tree (LOLIMOT) are used to process captured features; these methods are utilized in both “Single-sensor condition monitoring” and “Classification and fault detection” sections. It is shown that KNN networks are practical tools in the proposed fault detection procedure. The main novelty of this work comes from introducing a rich feature-extraction method based on a combination of FFT and db4 features. In addition, the complexity of computations and average running-time decrease while classification accuracy in the fuel injection fault detection procedure increases.