Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Expert Systems with Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

An engine fault diagnosis system using intake manifold pressure signal

and Wigner–Ville distribution technique
Jian-Da Wu *, Cheng-Kai Huang
Graduate Institute of Vehicle Engineering, National Changhua University of Education, 1 Jin-De Rd., Changhua City, Changhua 500, Taiwan, ROC

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: This paper proposed an engine fault diagnosis system based on intake manifold pressure signal and arti-
Fault diagnosis system ficial neural network with the Wigner–Ville distribution technique. Traditionally, the engine diagnostic
Intake manifold pressure method depends on the experience of the technician, but some faults might be inaccurately judged by
Wigner–Ville distribution the technician’s experience when the engine is operating. In the present study, an engine platform diag-
Artificial neural network
nosis system using intake manifold pressure was developed. The algorithm of the proposed system con-
sisted of Wigner–Ville distribution (WVD) for feature extraction and the neural network technique for
fault classification. In previous work, the Wigner–Ville distribution was often used to analyze the non-
stationary signal, because it provides a simple and clear energy spectrum diagram both in the time
and frequency domains. This instantaneous energy diagram presented the magnitude of each engine fault
under various operating conditions. The Wigner–Ville distribution extracts these features as database
input to a neural network and the neural network is used to develop the training and testing modules.
To prove the efficiency of the neural network, both the radial basis function neural network and general-
ized regression neural network are used and compared. The experimental results demonstrated the pro-
posed system is effective and the performance is satisfactory.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Owing to the fast growth of the automobile industry, road vehi-
cles have become a popular mode of transport in people’s daily life.
For electrical control internal-combustion engine, the intake man-
ifold pressure is an important factor in determining the air–fuel
mixture of engine combustion. It always demonstrates the engine
condition and affects the volumetric efficiency, fuel consumption
and performance of internal-combustion engines. The intake man-
ifold pressure is well known to be detrimental to engine system
stability and performance and it should be considered during reg-
ular maintenance. Traditional fault diagnosis depends on the tech-
nician experience and will introduce many subjective senses to
diagnose the fault in the engine. Unfortunately, the traditional pro-
cedure is not a precise approach to correctly classify when the en-
gine is operating. An efficient and exact fault diagnosis system
consists of a combination of automatic and computer system. In
the present study, an expert fault diagnostic system using
Wigner–Ville distribution (WVD) and neural network technology
is proposed for internal-combustion engine fault diagnosis.
Several useful signal processing techniques for fault diagnosis
have been developed, such as fast Fourier transform (FFT) (Corinth-
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: jdwu@cc.ncue.edu.tw (J.-D. Wu).
ios, 1971), and short time Fourier transform (STFT) (Portnoff,
1980). These methods are often applied in sound and vibration sig-
nals, but different analysis techniques are not suited to the intake
manifold pressure signal. The fast Fourier transform only shows
the amplitude in the frequency domain. And inspection of the sig-
nal magnitude using fast Fourier transform differs in the frequency
domain could not determine instantaneous variation. Although
short time Fourier transform provides a fixed-size window to solve
the problem in the time–frequency window (Baydar & Ball, 1996),
it can not present the instantaneous energy density spectrum of
signals. Meanwhile, the Wigner–Ville distribution technique has
been widely used in fault diagnosis, and the approach is worth
using to figure out the energy density from the time–frequency do-
main (Loutridis, 2006; Wang, Zhang, & Zhong, 2008). In the study,
the Wigner–Ville distribution is used in signals for feature extrac-
tion in the engine fault diagnosis system because the Wigner–Ville
distribution in the time–frequency domain could simply be used to
describe the instantaneous energy density spectrum.
In the fault signal classification, both the radial basis function
network (RBFN) and generalized regression neural network
(GRNN) are used for comparing the performance in the fault iden-
tification process. Generally, the back-propagation neural network
(BPNN) is the basic method in signal analysis (Parvoti & Anandara-
jan, 2002), but the neural network has many defects in the struc-
ture and training process. The training process of the radial basis

0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2010.06.099
 J.-D. Wu, C.-K. Huang / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544 537

function network is likely to be the BPNN (Sarker, Yegnanarayana,

& Khemani, 1998), but RBFN can automatically adjust the structure
of the training procedure and it does not use the iterative training
procedure to achieve the desired convergence value. However, the
GRNN could spend a very short convergence time to complete the x1
training procedure. In the following section, the proposed ap- y1
proach and performance of the engine fault diagnosis are x2
described.

2. Principles of the Wigner–Ville distribution technique yL

In general, STFT is a way to indicate the linear and time domain,

xn
but it can’t sketch the instantaneous energy density of a signal. The d ML
two-dimensional display is the method, which is more directly
predicted through the senses and is more convenient. WVD is
one of the most studied and applied methods in time–frequency aM
analysis. In this section, the features of intake manifold pressure
Input layer Hidden layer Output layer
signal are present by Wigner–Ville distribution. The Wigner–Ville
distribution is a quadratic-form time–frequency distribution with Fig. 1. Structure of radial basis function neural network.
optimized resolution in both the time and frequency domains.
The Wigner–Ville distribution supplies a high resolution and
instantaneous power density spectrum in the time and frequency
domains. For a signal x(t), the definition of the WVD (Staszewski, (Min & Jianhui, 2004; Pulido, Ruisanchez, & Rius, 1999; Simon,
Worden, & Tomlinson, 1997; Wu & Chiang, 2009) is 2002; Wu, Wang, Chiang, & Bai, 2009). The input layer collects
Z þ1
the input information and evaluates the input vector x. The hidden
W x ðt; f Þ ¼ xðt þ s=2Þx ðt  s=2Þds ð1Þ layer consists of L hidden nodes, which use nonlinear transforma-
1 tions to the input space. The transformation combining the input
where x*(t) means the complex conjugate of x(t). If x(t) is a real sig- and the hidden layers has unit weights. The third layer is the out-
nal, the analytic signal is defined as follows: put layer, and the transfer functions of the neurons are the linear
units. A hidden node l in an RBFN is represented by a vector ~ xl ,
xa ðtÞ ¼ xðtÞ þ j~xðtÞ ð2Þ which equals the input vector in dimension and width rl. The
where ~xðtÞ is the Hilbert transform of x(t), which is shown as activity vl(x) is presented by the Euclidean norm of the distance
Z between the input vector and the node center and is given by:
þ1
1 1
H½xðtÞ ¼ ~xðtÞ ¼ xðsÞ ds ð3Þ v l ðxÞ ¼ kx  ~xl k ð5Þ
p 1 ts
The hidden layer of the RBFN has several forms of nonzero activa-
Due to the classification of the different faults of the engine by the
tion functions. The node calculates the Euclidean distance between
neural network, the Wigner–Ville distribution result of signal will
the center and the network input vector and then passes the result
be adopted in the fault diagnosis system. Unfortunately, the feature
to the radial basis function. The basis function for the lth hidden
matrix of the intake manifold pressure signal using Wigner–Ville
node is often defined by a Gaussian exponential function:
distribution is very large. Therefore, a reprocessing approach is
!
proposed to reduce the calculation quality of the fault diagnosis v l ðxÞ2
system; which is shown as fl ðxÞ ¼ exp  ð6Þ
2r2l
Pt2 t1
n¼1 W x ðt; f Þ
dðf Þ ¼ ð4Þ The width of an RBF unit is selected as the root mean-square
t2  t1
distance to the nearest lth RBF unit. For the lth unit, the width rl
where d(f) represents the value of the time average in Wigner–Ville is defined as
distribution. After reprocessing the Wigner–Ville distribution, the !1=2
1X
p
domain of Wigner–Ville distribution data is a two-dimensional ma- 2
rl ¼ k~xl  ~xi k ð7Þ
trix. The values of the reprocessing approach will be used as the in- p i¼1
put to the fault diagnosis system for training and testing various
neural networks. where ~x1 ; ~x2 ; . . . ; ~xp are the p nearest unit centers to the unit l. The
factor p is chosen, and many units are activated when the database
is input to the neural network. The output value is given by:
3. Description of neural network models
X
s

3.1. Principle of the radial basis function network ym ¼ dlm al ; ð8Þ

l¼1

The applications of artificial neural networks have been ex-
tended in recent years, such as in speech recognition and fault
diagnosis. The term RBFN stands for many neural networks that
can all be combined within supervised feed-forward networks,
whose response functions are Gaussian-shaped functions. The
RBF network is comprised of three layers: the input layer, the hid-
den layer and the output layer. The network design of RBFN is
shown in Fig. 1, which has n input signals composing an input vec-
tor that are sent to a hidden layer composed of RBFN neural units
where ym, the mth element of the y, is the output of the mth node in
the output layer, dlm is the weight from the lth hidden layer neuron
to the mth output layer neuron, and al is the output of the lth unit in
the hidden layer.
To achieve a better recognition rate of the neural network, the
RBFN needs to be trained. The point of training involves determin-
ing the number of RBF nodes and the output layer weight values.
The method to represent the total square errors Es can be defined
as:
538 J.-D. Wu, C.-K. Huang / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544

Pn  dðx;x Þ R 1 
1X s X
i 2
b ðxÞ ¼ Pi¼1 e
i yedðy;yi Þdy
Es ¼ t m  yim ðxi Þ ð9Þ Y n R1
dðx;xi Þ 1 edðy;yi Þdy
 ð12Þ
2 i¼1 m i¼1 e 1
R1 2
where t im are the prospective values of the network, and S is the measuring the two indicated integrations, using 1
zez dz ¼ 0,
number of training samples. The number of hidden neurons is auto- yields the following:
matically calculated until the training value converges to prospec- Pn i
tive Es in the procedure. In the RBF network, the hidden layer is b ðXÞ ¼ Pi¼1 Y expðdðx; xi ÞÞ
Y ð13Þ
n
the most important layer providing most of the bunching power i¼1 expðdðx; xi ÞÞ

of the fault diagnosis process.

The Eq. (11) is the weighted sum over of all the training patterns.
After processing the hidden layer, the network has one weight
Each training pattern is weighted exponentially according to
value connected to the output layer. The output layer simply con-
smoothing factors and its Euclidean distance to the unknown pat-
sists of linear summation units with a linear activation function.
tern x. The smoothing factor with each feature with a small value
The output layer weight value is trained by linear square regres-
should be assigned to insignificant features so they have a minimal
sion. If the result does not contain the convergence conditions,
effect on the distance estimate. When the smoothing parameter r is
the network system will add a neuron to the hidden layer and
made large, the estimated density is forced to be smooth and the
the feed-forward stage is repeated until the convergence condi-
limit becomes a multivariate Gaussian with covariance r2I. A smal-
tions are contained.
ler value of r allows the estimated density to assume non-Gaussian
shapes, but the hazard wild points may have a significant influence
3.2. Generalized regression neural network on the estimate. The design of GRNN is shown in Fig. 2, which is
based on the input and output vectors to approach any arbitrary
In drawing the fault diagnosis plan, a classified approach of the function. The design is a one-pass leaning algorithm, which has
features based on Wigner–Ville distribution was chosen to esti- an input layer, pattern layer, summation layer and output layer.
mate the effectiveness of the selected feature data for the fault The number of the input equals the number of independent fea-
classification system. The BPNN is the popular method in mechan- tures. The pattern layer represents a training layer in the design
ical fault diagnosis, but has many flaws such as: redundant learn- of the neural network.
ing rate and repeating the training procedure of the convergence
value. Therefore, the advantage of the GRNN is it is very fast be-
4. Experimental investigation and signal processing
cause it does not need repeat training to achieve a convergent
value.
4.1. Experimental arrangement of the engine platform
The GRNN was first proposed by Specht (1991). The GRNN does
not need an iterative training process and a large amount of weight
To estimate the proposed Wigner–Ville distribution and neural
calculations as with BPNN. The weight values of GRNN are regular
network of the fault diagnosis system, a fuel injection engine plat-
and are determined by the vector of the training data. The GRNN
form was used to measure the intake manifold pressure signal for
differs from the regression analysis of the conventional method,
the diagnosis system. The Wigner–Ville distribution method was
so it is presented by probability density function (PDF). By defini-
used to analyze the intake manifold pressure signal for extracting
tion, the GRNN is a method of evaluating a dependent variable y
its features, and these were applied to the input of the neural net-
on an independent variable x calculates the most probable value
works for fault diagnosis under various operating conditions. The
for y, given x and a training set. If the joint probable distribution
equipment for the experiment included an internal-combustion
between a set of independent variables x and a dependent variable
engine (Ford L type, four-stroke, four cylinders, 1.6-L injection en-
y exists, then it is well known the estimation of y given a particular
gine), pressure sensor and a data acquisition system (NI-9215)
realization of X is given by:
with 10 kHz sampling frequency. The experiment comprises five
R1 engine fault conditions and five engine rotating speeds. These con-
yf ðX; yÞdy
^ðxÞ ¼ R1
E½yjX ¼ y 1 ð10Þ ditions are the normal engine condition, one fuel injector fault, two
1
f ðX; yÞdy
fuel injector faults, intake air-leak and intake plugged. In the
the density f(x, y) is unknown, it must usually be evaluated from
the training sample using the Parzen’s nonparametric estimator.
x1 x2 x3 xp
The probability estimator ^f ðX; YÞ is based on the sample values
Xi and Yi of the random variables x and y, where n is the number
of sample observations and p is the dimension of the vector vari- Input layer
able x:

1 X
n
2
^f ðX; YÞ ¼  edðx;xi Þ e½ðyyi Þ=ðry Þ ð11Þ
ðpþ1Þ=2
nð2pÞ r1 r2    rp ry i¼1
Pattern layer
Pp 2
where dðx; xi Þ ¼ j¼1 ½ðxj  xij Þ=rj  , and a physical explication of the
possibility evaluation ^f ðX; YÞ is it assigns the sample probability of
width r for each sample Xi and Yi. Here r is the parameter repre-
∑ ∑ Summation layer
senting the width of the ‘‘kernel function”, and is called the smooth-
ing factor (Parzen, 1962).
Connecting a smoothing factor with each feature is an implicit
way to sketch the features to depend on their predictive signifi- Output layer
cance. The probability estimation is the sum of these sample prob-
abilities. Replacing the joint probability evaluate in Eq. (9) into the y( x)
condition mean Eq. (8), and exchanging the order of integration
and summation yields Fig. 2. Architecture of generalized regression neural network.
 J.-D. Wu, C.-K. Huang / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544 539

experimental work, the engine was operated in an idle condition
(800 rpm), 1000 rpm, 1500 rpm, 2000 rpm and 3000 rpm.
4.2. Experimental process and signals analysis
In the present research, the engine intake manifold pressure
signals were analyzed to verify the proposed faulted diagnosis sys-
tem. After the experimental work, the intake manifold pressure
signals of the engine were recorded by a pressure sensor with a
data acquisition system. Fig. 3 shows the experimental procedure
of the intake manifold fault diagnosis system. The fuel injection en-
gine platform was used in this experimental work. A pressure sen-
sor was used to measure the intake manifold pressure of the
engine platform. The pressure signals were transited using pres-
sure sensors and recorded using a data acquisition system, and
then used the Wigner–Ville distribution to display the different
diagram from the intake manifold pressure signals. The features
were normalized using Eq. (4) to simplify these data. Then, the fea-
tures were fed into the RBFN and GRNN for fault identification.
In the classification, both RBFN and GRNN were evaluated for
the proposed system. The purpose of the neural network is to find
the same engine fault under different operation conditions. All

Pressure signal
Data Acquisition System

Pressure sensor
Wigner-Ville distribution

Identification Data Instantaneous energy

density spectrum

Training Data

GRNN
Classifiers

Engine RBFN

Result

Fig. 3. Experimental setup of engine fault diagnosis system.

Fig. 4. Intake manifold pressure signal of idle in normal condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.
540 J.-D. Wu, C.-K. Huang / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544

experiment data are separated into two parts because RBFN and the experimental results. In the engine platform, there are 200 data
GRNN are the supervised learning networks. The experiment data in each operation, 40 data sets are used to train faults in the neural
are divided into the testing and training parts. The networks use network, and 160 testing data sets are used to classify the result of
the database to train data and employ the testing data to verify the training database.

Fig. 5. Intake manifold pressure signal of idle with one injector fault condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.

Fig. 6. Intake manifold pressure signal of idle with two injector fault condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.
 J.-D. Wu, C.-K. Huang / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544 541

4.3. Experimental results and classification
According to the present study, the intake manifold pressure
signals are feature extraction by Wigner–Ville distribution. The
diagrams of instantaneous energy density are shown in Figs. 4–
13. Clearly, the energy amplitudes of the intake manifold pressure
signal shown in the figures differ from one another. After feature
extraction, the instantaneous energy of various faults is fed into
the proposed intelligent fault diagnosis system for fault classifica-
tion. The recognition rate of fault classification using RBF and

Fig. 7. Intake manifold pressure signal of idle with intake air-leak condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.

Fig. 8. Intake manifold pressure signal of idle with intake plugged condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.
542 J.-D. Wu, C.-K. Huang / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544

GRNN are summarized in Tables 1 and 2. In the result, the pro-
posed system has an acceptable recognition rate for fault diagnosis
under several engine operating conditions. Despite all the evalua-
tion results having high recognition rates, however, the results
show the classification time of GRNN is less than RBFN. Because
the RBF has a feed-forward stage during the training procedure,
it took much more training time to achieve the convergence goal.
Thus, the GRNN network can quickly complete the training process
and obtain an optimal identification rate.

Fig. 9. Intake manifold pressure signal in 3000 rpm in normal condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.

Fig. 10. Intake manifold pressure signal in 3000 rpm one injector fault condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.
 J.-D. Wu, C.-K. Huang / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544 543

Fig. 11. Intake manifold pressure signal in 3000 rpm two injector fault condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.

Fig. 12. Intake manifold pressure signal in 3000 rpm intake air-leak condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.

5. Conclusions using Wigner–Ville distribution for feature extraction and the arti-
ficial neural network for classification was performed. The Wig-
In the present study, an investigation of an expert system based ner–Ville distribution extracts the features as input for a neural
on intake manifold pressure fault diagnosis in the engine platform network in the proposed system. In the fault identification, the
544 J.-D. Wu, C.-K. Huang / Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 536–544

Fig. 13. Intake manifold pressure signal in 3000 rpm intake plugged condition using Wigner–Ville distribution.

References
Table 1
Performance of fault recognition using RBF in various faults and operation conditions. Baydar, N., & Ball, A. (1996). A comparative study of acoustic and vibrations in
detection of gear failures using Wigner–Ville distribution. Mechanical System
Idle 1000 rpm 1500 rpm 2000 rpm 3000 rpm and Signal Processing, 15(6), 1091–1107.
Normal (%) 100 100 100 100 75 Corinthios, M. J. (1971). A fast Fourier transform for high-speed signal processing.
One injector fault (%) 100 100 100 100 100 IEEE Transactions on Computers, C20, 843–846.
Two injectors fault 100 100 100 100 94 Loutridis, S. J. (2006). Instantaneous energy density as a feature for gear fault
detection. Mechanical System and Signal Processing, 20, 1239–1253.
(%)
Min, H., & Jianhui, X. (2004). Efficient clustering of radial basis perceptron neural
Intake air-leak (%) 100 100 100 100 77.5
network for pattern recognition. Pattern Recognition, 37, 2059–2067.
Intake plugged (%) 100 100 100 100 100
Parvoti, F. Y., & Anandarajan, M. (2002). Classifying inventory using an artificial
Average (%) 97.86 neural network approach. Computer and Industrial Engineering, 40, 389–404.
Time (s) 23.4 Parzen, E. (1962). An estimation of a probability density function and mode. The
Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 33, 1065–1076.
Portnoff, M. (1980). Time–frequency representation of digital signal and system
based on short-time Fourier analysis. IEEE Transactions on Acoustic, Speech and
Table 2 Signal Processing, 28, 55–69.
Performance of fault recognition using GRNN in various faults and operation Pulido, A., Ruisanchez, I., & Rius, F. X. (1999). Radial basis functions applied to
conditions. classification of UV–visible spectra. Analytica Chimica Acta, 388, 273–281.
Sarker, M., Yegnanarayana, B., & Khemani, D. (1998). Backpropagation learning
idle 1000 rpm 1500 rpm 2000 rpm 3000 rpm algorithms for classification with fuzzy mean square error. Pattern Recognition
Normal (%) 99.38 100 100 99.38 100 Letters, 19, 43–51.
One injector fault 100 99.38 100 100 100 Simon, D. (2002). Training radial basis neural networks with the extended Kalman
(%) filter. Neurocomputing, 48, 455–475.
Specht, D. F. (1991). A general regression neural network. IEEE Transactions on
Two injectors fault 100 100 100 100 100
Neural Networks, 2, 568–576.
(%)
Staszewski, W. J., Worden, K., & Tomlinson, G. R. (1997). Time–frequency analysis in
Intake air-leak (%) 100 100 100 96.25 96.25 gear box fault detection using the Wigner–Ville distribution and pattern
Intake plugged (%) 100 100 100 99.38 97.5 recognition. Mechanical System and Signal Processing, 11(5), 673–692.
Average (%) 99.5 Wang, C., Zhang, Y., & Zhong, Z. (2008). Fault diagnosis for diesel valve trains based
Time (s) 17.5 on time–frequency images. Mechanical System and Signal Processing, 22,
1981–1993.
Wu, J. D., & Chiang, P. H. (2009). Application of Wigner–Ville distribution and
probability neural network for scooter engine fault diagnosis. Expert Systems
artificial neural network both using RBFN and GRNN were carried with Applications, 36, 2187–2199.
Wu, J. D., Wang, Y. H., Chiang, P. H., & Bai, M. R. (2009). A study of fault diagnosis in
out and compared in the fault diagnosis system. The experimental scooter using adaptive order tracking technique and neural network. Expert
results showed the GRNN is better than RBFN both for the fault rec- Systems with Applications, 36, 49–56.
ognition rate and for classification time.