Study of on-line condition monitoring and fault feature extraction for marine diesel engines based on tribological information

Reliability and safety issues on marine diesel engines have been received and still need considerable attentions. The literature review indicates that a large amount of failures are caused by abnormal wear of the diesel engine components. It is therefore essential to monitor the engine condition using the tribological information. To further promote the oil monitoring technology into industrial application, a new on-line condition monitoring and remote fault diagnosis system for marine diesel engines is proposed in this article. The new system consists of an on-line tribological signal acquisition model in the ship, a remote feature extraction model and a fault diagnosis model in the laboratory center. The third-generation telecommunication (3G/B3G) which is called wireless communication system is adopted to connect the remote ship with laboratory center. Nine wear characteristics are extracted to detect the engine faults. Experimental tests are implemented on a diesel engine in a real ship named Changjing 2 to evaluate the performance of the proposed fault diagnosis system. The results show that index of particle covered area can be treated as the best feature for marine diesel engines fault detection. The results also reflect that the new system offers satisfactory on-line fault diagnosis ability and is effective for the diesel engine fault diagnosis in practice.