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Expert Systems with Applications

Expert Systems with Applications 34 (2008) 27042713 www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

An expert system for fault diagnosis in internal combustion engines using probability neural network
Jian-Da Wu
a

a,*

, Peng-Hsin Chiang a, Yo-Wei Chang b, Yao-jung Shiao

Graduate Institute of Vehicle Engineering, National Changhua University of Education, 1 Jin-De Rd., Changhua City, Changhua 500, Taiwan, ROC b Department of Vehicle Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan, ROC

Abstract An expert system for fault diagnosis in internal combustion engines using adaptive order tracking technique and articial neural networks is presented in this paper. The proposed system can be divided into two parts. In the rst stage, the engine sound emission signals are recorded and treated as the tracking of frequency-varying bandpass signals. Ordered amplitudes can be calculated with a highresolution adaptive lter algorithm. The vital features of signals with various fault conditions are obtained and displayed clearly by order gures. Then the sound energy diagram is utilized to normalize the features and reduce computation quantity. In the second stage, the articial neural network is used to train the signal features and engine fault conditions. In order to verify the eect of the proposed probability neural network (PNN) in fault diagnosis, two conventional neural networks that included the back-propagation (BP) network and radial-basic function (RBF) network are compared with the proposed PNN network. The experimental results indicated that the proposed PNN network achieved the best performance in the present fault diagnosis system. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Faults diagnosis system; Feature extraction; Adaptive order tracking; Articial neural network; Probability neural network

1. Introduction In recent years, automatic and on-line faults diagnosis systems have developed to a high level of quality in modern industry, because the advanced faults diagnosis system has been used to prevent serious damages. For example, a conventional diagnosis of damaged elements in an engine is to conduct a visual inspection when the engine is shutdown (Crouse & Anglin, 1993). Obviously, the conventional inspection is not a precise approach for diagnosis of damage; it also is not a suitable method for diagnosis when the engine is in a suitable operating condition. In the vehicle mechanism, the noise emission is generated from the rotating elements when the elements are damaged. Interest in mechanical fault diagnosis using sound emission and vibration signal has grown signicantly, having advanced with

Corresponding author. E-mail address: jdwu@cc.ncue.edu.tw (J.-D. Wu).

the progress of digital signal-processing technology and hardware in the last two decades (Liu, Riemenschneider, & Xu, 2006; Peng & Chu, 2004; Tse, Yang, & Tam, 2004). In diagnostic technology, order tracking is a well-known technique that can be used for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery by using sound emission or vibration signals. The order tracking technique normally exploits a signal supplemented with information of the shaft speed of rotating machinery for fault diagnosis. Unfortunately, most of the conventional order tracking methods are primarily based on Fourier analysis with the revolution of the machinery. The smearing problem in frequency-varying signals generally causes undesirable eects in high speed and high order signals. In order to overcome this problem, a number of new techniques have been proposed, e.g. adaptive order tracking technique (Bai, Jeng, & Chen, 2002), and adaptive wavelet analysis technique (Lin & Zuo, 2003). Most of the methods can extract the order of features embedded in the sound emission and vibration signal of the mechanical system.

0957-4174/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2007.05.010

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Furthermore, order tracking is one of the important tools for feature extraction of rotating machinery. The order amplitude gure gives the information of the harmonic order signal in the mechanical system. Ordinarily, the amplitude of fault conditions is higher than without fault condition. So it is very easy to distinguish the fault and without fault conditions. Although order tracking make it easy to distinguish the fault and without fault condition, it was not easy to distinguish dierent faults conditions. A fuzzy-logic inference is used to develop the diagnostic rules of the data base with order tracking amplitude features (Wu & Wang, 2007). The fuzzy-logic inference carry out calculate complex numerical analysis and use a membership value easily understandable and explainable by human. Meanwhile, various approaches have been proposed such as dynamic mode-based methods (Luh & Cheng, 2005), genetic algorithm (Wen & Chang, 1998) lmez and articial neural networks (Kong & Chen, 2004; O & Dokur, 2003; Yang, Han, & An, 2004). Articial neural networks are widely applied in data analysis or patterns recognition, and among them, the back-propagation (BP) neural network is the most commonly used in this eld (Parvoti & Anandarajan, 2002). Although the BP neural network is popularly used in engineering and there are several developed algorithms to improve convergence times and to prevent it from trapping into the local minimum, their eectiveness are restricted. Moreover, the architecture of the BP network also has a problem. The numbers of hidden layers and neurons in the hidden layer makes it dicult for a beginner to easily understand. However the radial-basic function (RBF) neural network provided more eective methods for training and organizing its structure and the RBF network did not have the problem of trapping into the local minimum. Unfortunately, the RBF network had to repeatedly operate until the network achieved the specied mean squared error goal. On the contrary, the proposed probability neural network (PNN) did not require the iteration procedure. The major advantage of the PNN network is that only one epoch of training is needed and the PNN network could accomplish training and classifying in an extremely short time. In the present study, the PNN network is proposed for training the order tracking features of various faults in an experimental internal combustion engine. In order to verify the eect of the PNN network in a fault diagnosis system, the BP network and RBF network are compared with the proposed PNN network. The principles of adaptive order tracking and neural network in the proposed system are described in the following sections. 2. Feature extraction using adaptive order tracking Interest in fault diagnosis using order tracking technique has grown signicantly with the advance in digital signalprocessing algorithm and technology (Pan & Lin, 2006; Wu, Huang, & Chen, 2005). Order tracking technique nor-

mally exploits a sound emission or vibration signal supplemented with the information of shaft revolution for fault diagnosis of the rotating machinery. The energy amplitude gures of dierent orders give the information of harmonic order signals in the system. The wave of the amplitudemodulated signal can track its frequency continually with respect to the fundamental and multiple frequencies in the rotating machinery. Order tracking is also used to analyze and track the energy of order signals from dynamic signals. In general, order tracking may produce frequency smearing in high speed and high order signal. When there is either a high sweep rate or low sweep rate, the analysis concerning order signal is insucient, and this will result in erroneous result in order tracking. Therefore, in the present study, the problem is treated as the tracking of frequency-varying bandpass signals. Order amplitudes can be calculated with high-resolution after experimental implementation of the sound emission signal. After experimental implementation, the tachometer and sound signals of the engine are presented as high-resolution order gures. With the order gure, the amplitudes of sound emission are clearly shown in basic frequency and its harmonics. Fig. 1 is an example of the order gures of sound signal from an engine without fault condition. The dierent engine operation conditions present dierent order gures. In order to discriminate different fault conditions, the normalization of the order gures is necessary. The normalization procedure of the order gures is described as Pq j1 ej dk 1 n where dk denotes the kth point of the energy diagram, ej means energy of the kth order, and n is the number of points. When the sound emission is a p q matrix, through the order tracking calculated the order gures is a p q k, in which k is the order number. Fig. 2 presents the result of the order gure following the normalization procedure. After the normalization procedure calculation, it then takes the energy diagrams (p k matrix) as the input to the diagnosis system for classication. In the fault classication, the articial neural network is applied in the proposed system; among the articial neural networks, the PNN neural network is proposed in the present system due to its simplicity, robustness and good generalization ability. 3. Fault classication using the probabilistic neural network 3.1. Principle of probabilistic neural network PNN is a feed-forward three-layer neural network (Rutkowski, 2004; Cang & Yu, 2005; Karthikeyan, Gopal, & Vimala, 2005; Hajmeer & Basheer, 2002), the architecture of the probabilistic neural network is shown as Fig. 3. The PNN neural network uses supervised learning to develop activation functions in the hidden layer; they are applied to evaluate the possibility of the input vector in the recall mode. The PNN neural network is a radial-