An intelligent approach for engine fault diagnosis based on Hilbert–Huang transform and support vector machine

Abstract

Based on the techniques of Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) and support vector machine (SVM), a noise-based intelligent method for engine fault diagnosis (EFD), so-called HHT–SVM model, is developed in this paper. The noises of a sample engine under normal and several fault states are first measured and denoised by using the wavelet packet threshold method to initially lower the noise level with negligible signal distortion. To extract fault features of the engine, then, the HHT is selected and applied to the measured noise signals. A nine-dimensional vector, which consists of seven intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) from the empirical mode decomposition (EMD), maximum value of HHT marginal spectrum and its corresponding frequency component, is specified to represent each engine fault feature. Finally, an optimal SVM model is established and trained for engine failure classification by using the fault feature vectors of the noise signals. Cross-validation results show that the proposed noise-based HHT–SVM method is accurate and effective for engine fault diagnosis. Due to outstanding time–frequency characteristics and pattern recognition capacity of the HHT and SVM, the newly proposed HHT–SVM can be used to deal with both the stationary and nonstationary signals, and even the transient ones. In the view of applications, the HHT–SVM technique may be suggested not only to detect the abnormal states of vehicle engines, but also to be extended to other fields for failure diagnosis in engineering.