Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS Int.

Conference on ROBOTICS, CONTROL and MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY

Automatic Fault Diagnosis of Internal Combustion Engine Based

on Spectrogram and Artificial Neural Network
Sandeep Kumar Yadav Prem Kumar Kalra
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
Department of Electrical Engineering Department of Electrical Engineering
Kanpur, 208016 Kanpur, 208016
India India
sandeepy@iitk.ac.in kalra@iitk.ac.in

Abstract: This paper presents a signal analysis technique for internal combustion (IC) engine fault diagnosis based
on the spectrogram and artificial neural network (ANN). Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of IC engine
through acoustic signal analysis is an established technique for detecting early stages of component degradation.
The location dependent characteristic fault frequencies make it possible to detect the presence of a fault and to
diagnose on what part of the engine the fault is. The difficulty of localized fault detection lies in the fact that the
energy of the signature of a faulty engine is spread across a wide frequency band and hence can be easily buried
by noise. To solve this problem, the spectrogram for an integrated time frequency pattern extraction of the engine
vibration is proposed. The method offers the advantage of good localization of the acoustic signal energy in the
time frequency domain. Statistical parameters like, kurtosis, shape factor, crest factor, mean, median, variance etc.
are used for feature extraction in time-frequency domain, and artificial neural network (ANN) was employed to
identify the faults in IC engine. Experimental results show that the proposed method is very effective.

Key–Words: Fault Diagnosis, Acoustic Analysis, Internal Combustion Engine,

1 Introduction sumption that is wide spread in all time series anal-

Several techniques have been reported in the literature
for engine fault detection. Based on the type of sig-
nals, they can be classified into acoustic signal analy-
sis, temperature measurement, cylinder pressure anal-
ysis, electrical current analysis, and vibration mea-
surement [1]. The vibration signatures of normally
aspirated engine contain valuable information on the
health of combustion chamber components. It cold be
used to detect the incipient faults in the engine [2].
Vibration and acoustic emission signals are often
used for fault signal diagnosis in mechanical systems,
since they carry dynamic information from the me-
chanical elements [3-7]. These signals normally con-
sists of a combination of the fundamental frequency
with a narrow band frequency and the harmonics [8].
Most of these are related to the revolutions of the ro-
tating system since the energy of acoustic and vibra-
tion signal is increased when mechanical element is
damaged or worn out.
An acoustic and vibration based signal analy-
sis techniques used for fault signal analysis include
power spectra in time domain or frequency domain,
and they can provide an effective technique for ma-
chinery diagnosis provided that is the assumption that
the signal is stationary [9-13]. The stationary as-
ysis methods may not hold at the within rotation scale
due to variable loading conditions or faults of the sig-
nal that is measured during one shaft rotation may be
severely nonstationary. From the time frequency char-
acteristics of such a signal, valuable information about
machine or component condition can be extracted.
There have been several claims that incipient and
developing faults in machine components can better
be characterized in the time frequency domain [14-
15]. Short duration transients effect due to intermit-
tent or transient vibration give rise to sudden and brief
changes in signal amplitude or phase; this will hardly
be visible in the spectrum, because energy is dispersed
in the temporal averaging process.
In this study, the spectrogram is used for an in-
tegrated time frequency signature extraction for the
analysis of different faults in the internal combus-
tion engine. Various statistical features like Kurtosis,
Variance, Skewness, Shape factor, Root mean square
value, Absolute mean, Zero crossing rate, Maxi-
mum Peak, are computed from the information ob-
tained from the spectrogram representation of differ-
ent faults. These statistical features were used for fault
classification using neural network. Back-propagation
algorithm was used with feed-forward neural network

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 Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS Int. Conference on ROBOTICS, CONTROL and MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY

as a classifier [16, 17].

The live acoustic signals were acquired under
seven conditions which includes six fault states and
the normal operating state. For the present study, four
microphones were placed at different locations of the
IC engine. Data for each microphone output was ana-
lyzed using proposed Spectrogram-ANN method and
finally adopted the majority voting scheme for deci-
sion making.
Rest of the paper organized as follows. In section
2, the proposed technique for feature extraction and
classification has been discussed. Section 3 gives the
overview of types of faults and experimental setup. In
section 4, performance of the proposed has been tested
on real life data sets. Conclusion are given in section
5.

2 Proposed Method
The proposed method for automatic fault diagnosis
used in this study is shown in Figure 1, where fre-
quency features are extracted using spectrogram. The
use of spectrogram for display and visual analysis is
preferred due to its positivity and its energy represen-
tation characteristics [18]. To get the insight of the Figure 1: Automatic fault diagnosis procedure using
effects of time domain signals for different faults are spectrogram with neural network
transformed into the time frequency domain via STFT
(Spectrogram) [19]. Spectrogram representation for
different faults is shown in Figures 2 to 7. Figure 8 tude of the STFT of the signal x(t).
shows the frequency band of activity for the studied
faults. Pspectrogram,x (τ, ω) = |ST F Tx (τ, ω)|2 . (2)

The window w(t) allows the localization of the spec-

2.1 Feature extraction
The basic purpose of time-frequency analysis is to de-
fine a function which will describe the energy density
of a signal simultaneously in time and frequency and
is commonly used in applications like speech, sonar,
acoustic and vibration signals. STFT is very popular
in describing the signal in time-frequency domain and
is widely used in non-stationary signal analysis.
The concept of STFT is to cut the signal into a
suitable overlapping time segments (using windowing
method) and do the Fourier analysis of each time seg-
ment to find the frequency content in it. The aggre-
gation of such spectra represents how the spectrum is
changing in time and is called the spectrogram [20,
21]. STFT of a signal x(t) is written as:
Z ∞
ST F Tx (τ, ω) = x(t)w∗ (t − τ )e−jωt dt (1)
−∞
Where ω denotes the frequency in a window w(t)
around t = τ . The spectrogram is the squared magni-
trum in time, but also spreads in frequency in accor-
dance with the uncertainty relationship [22], leading
to trade off between time resolution and frequency
resolution. The major problem with the application
of spectrogram is its non-uniqueness, means any win-
dow may be applied to form a valid spectrogram [18].
By seeing the spectrogram representation of different
fault signals, we were able to make following infer-
ences:
• Cam chain noise pattern were seen to appear in
the band of 0.7 kHz to 2 kHz in the form of
horizontal line across the spectrogram. Another
additional observation made was that as the en-
gine speed was increased, the cam chain signa-
ture shifted upwards in the spectrogram.
• Pattern of primary gear problem appears in the
band of 2 kHz to 3 kHz. This manifests in the
form of a continuous horizontal line at around 2
.5 kHz, which when observed in isolation, pro-
duces a whining kind of noise (primary gear

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 Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS Int. Conference on ROBOTICS, CONTROL and MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY

Feature number Time-domain features

|ē| = N1 N
P
1. Absolute mean i=0 |ei |
2. Maximum peak value ep = max(e)
q P
3. Root mean square erms = N1 N 2
i=1 ei
√
er = ( N1 N 2
P
4. Square root value i=1 ei )
1 PN
5. Variance var = N −1 i=1 (ei − ē)2
β = N1 N 4
P
6. Kurtosis i=1 ei
|e|peak
7. Crest factor C = erms
8. Shape factor Sf = erms|ē|
q
estd = N1 N 2
P
9. Standard deviation i=1 (ei − ē)
Figure 2: Spectrogram Representation of CCN Fault
Table 1: Statistical features

whine), and when small vertical lines emanating

from this root are observed, it indicates the pres-
ence of gear damage problem.

• Pattern of cylinder head noise was found to be

co-located with that of tappet. In case of severe /
high degree manifestation of the problem, their
signatures were observed to bear resemblance
to that of tappet noise but dispersed /smeared
slightly in time axis. In most cases of cylinder
head noise, it was seen that there was a distinct
Figure 3: Spectrogram Representation of CHN Fault
activity in the band of 3.5 kHz to approximately
4.5 kHz, disjoint from the tappet signatures.

• Pattern of tappet noise appears in the band of

approximately 4 kHz to 12 kHz and it mani-
fests in two simultaneously occurring patterns.
A base at around 4 kHz on the spectrogram with
equally spaced vertical lines are emanating from
this root. The height and thickness of these ver-
tical lines were found to be proportional to the
severity of the problem.

• Pattern of MRN fault is overlapping with in the

band of CCN fault, and pattern of PGW fault is
overlapping with that of the PGD fault. Figure 4: Spectrogram Representation of PGD Fault

Frequency spectrum section between 0.2 kHz to 6 2.2 Classification

kHz is chosen for investigating the fault patterns, be-
cause patterns of the studied faults are very intense in
this region. The spectrum or time series signal of each
frequency band between 0.2 kHz to 6 kHz after spec-
trogram was processed to compute the features like
Shape factor, Crest factor, Kurtosis, Variance, Root
mean square, Absolute mean, Square root value, Stan-
dard deviation, and Maximum peak value. Mathemat-
ical formulation of statistical features are given in Ta-
ble I.
A feed-forward neural network (FFNN) was designed
and trained on the above mentioned features to clas-
sify IC engine condition.
2.2.1 Classification using ANN
In this study, the feed-forward neural network, which
has got the back propagation algorithm, was used for
classification of features for different fault classes. In-

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 Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS Int. Conference on ROBOTICS, CONTROL and MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY
Figure 5: Spectrogram Representation of PGW Fault
Figure 6: Spectrogram Representation of TAPPET
Fault
Figure 7: Spectrogram Representation of MRN Fault
puts propagate from input layer to output layer via one
hidden layer. By trial-and-error method, the number
of nodes in the hidden layer is chosen as 12. The out-
put nodes are decided by the number of fault patterns
available for the analysis as: Healthy: [1 0 0 0 0 0 0]T ;
CCN: [0 1 0 0 0 0 0]T ; CHN: [0 0 1 0 0 0 0]T ;
PGD: [0 0 0 1 0 0 0]T ; PGW: [0 0 0 0 1 0 0]T ; Tap-
pet: [0 0 0 0 0 1 0]T ; MRN: [0 0 0 0 0 0 1]T . After
the ANN is successfully trained; it would be ready to
test the samples to identify their fault classes.
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Figure 8: Activity band for different faults
3 Experimental Setup
Multiple sensory mechanism is designed for data col-
lection process. Different faults occur in different
parts of the engine and hence multiple sensory sys-
tems are used to capture fault with higher accuracy.
Numerically, it was observed that significant improve-
ment can be achieved when using multiple sensor data
[23]. This validated our understanding that a faulted
system is localized and can be detected by the neigh-
boring sensor. Table 2.4 depicts origin of fault with
respect to these four positions. Engine speed was kept
to 3000 RPM (2750-3250 RPM). Figure 9 shows com-
plete experimental setup, for condition monitoring im-
plemented for real time testing of engines. In order to
verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique, six
different faults were seeded in the engine. In view of
recording the data for these seeded faults four micro-
phones were placed at four different locations of the
engine. Faults and nearest position of accelerometers
are given in Table II.
LabVIEW 8.0 was used as a platform to commu-
nicate with the cDAQ-9172 hardware. Using VI’s in
LabVIEW, an easy to use menu driven user interface
was used to record the engine acoustic samples. The
sampling rate of the data acquisition system was 50
kHz. The seeded faults are described below:
3.1 Tappet noise
Tappet is only that part of a rocker arm which makes
contact with an intake or exhaust valve stem above
the cylinder head of an IC engine [24]. As the cam ro-
tates it creates both a sideways and a downward force
on the tappet. Without a tappet (and the cam acting
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 Proceedings of the 10th WSEAS Int. Conference on ROBOTICS, CONTROL and MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY
Figure 9: Experimental setup
S. No. Fault Nearest Position of Accelerometer
1 CCN Position 1 (P1), P2 and/or P4
2 CHN Position 4 (P4)
3 MRN Position 3 (P3)
4 PGD Position 3 (P3)
5 PGW Position 3 (P3)
6 TAPPET Position 1 and/or 2
Table 2: Fault and nearest position of accelerometers
directly on the valve) the sideways force would cause
the valve stem to bend. With a tappet the sideways
force is transferred to the cylinder head so only the
downward force acts on the valve stem. Technically,
the nominal distance (clearance) between the tappet
surface and the valve’s contact surface was maintained
by means of an adjustment screw on the rocker arm.
Tappet noise appears whenever the tappet clearance is
too high. Under ideal setting the inlet and outlet tap-
pet clearance are kept close to 0.07/0.08 mm. Any
deviation from these set values results in generation
of tappet noise. To seed tappet faults the tappet clear-
ances of both inlet and outlet port were deviated from
their ideal settings. The tappet clearances of both inlet
and outlet port were set to 0.08, 0.11, 0.13, 0.14, 0.15
and 0.20 (all in mm).
3.2 Cam chain noise (CCN)
The cam chain is the element within the engine which
transfers the drive from the crank shaft to the cam
shaft. The cam chain rides along two riders. The ten-
sion on the cam chain can be adjusted by pushing the
slider inwards or outwards. This can be done using
the tension adjuster, which is accessible. Whenever
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cam chain is under tension, it produces the cam chain
noise. All Cam Chain noise faults were seeded by
varying the tension on the Cam Chain using the ten-
sion adjuster.
3.3 Primary gear damage (PGD)
The gear assembly is located within the crank case. It
comprises a set of drive gear and driven gears assem-
bly. Drive gear is also called primary gear. Any ab-
normality in these gears in the form of tooth damage,
tooth profile error, eccentric/inclined bore, results in
typical impact kind of noise. The PGD faults were
seeded individually introducing defects in the drive
gear and driven gears.
3.4 Cylinder head noise (CHN)
In an internal combustion engine, the cylinder head
sits above the cylinders and consists of a platform
containing part of the combustion chamber and the
location of the valves and spark plugs. Any noise
emanating from the cylinder head which is not pro-
duced by the tappet clearance is termed as the cylin-
der head noise. The component other than the valve
and rocker arm assembly within the cylinder head is
the cam shaft. Any defect on the cam shaft known
as cam-lobe NC tends to produce the cylinder head
noise.
3.5 Primary gear whining (PGW)
The origin of gear whining is gear mesh (misalign-
ment), which may be design, manufacturing assem-
bly and operation- related cause. The level of per-
ceived noise depends on the dynamic properties of
all gear bore components and the interfaces between
them. Gear whining signal had the character of a sinu-
soidal signal and its frequency is velocity dependant,
the noise level decreases as the speed decreases. This
noise can be captured more efficiently when the en-
gine runs on the gears.
3.6 Magneto rotor
The stator, in conjunction with the rotor (its appear-
ance is like brass made hollow cylindrical object, Lo-
cated under the left engine cover) that covers it, is re-
sponsible for the spark, lighting, and charging system.
Under the rotor, there are 3 coils; the source, the pul-
sar, and the lighting/charge coils. The source coil al-
lows a spark to be generated, the pulsar tells our en-
gine when to make a spark at the spark plug, and the
lighting generates the required voltage for headlight
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Category P1 P2 P3 P4 Maj. Vot. a performance of more than 73% for all the positions
Healthy 97.67 93.02 90.69 90.69 93.02 and various faults. For overall classification a majority
CCN 83.33 76.67 80 83.33 83.33 voting (M.V) scheme (choosing at least 3 out of 4 out-
CHN 86.66 83.33 80 90 86.67 puts), and for this scheme accuracy is lying between
PGD 87.80 82.92 92.68 95.12 87.80 83% to 93%. The experimental results show that the
Spectrogram-ANN technique can be used effectively
Tappet 90 90 85 92.5 90
in IC engine diagnosis for various faults through mea-
PGW 86.04 79.06 83.72 88.37 83.72 surement of engine acoustic signals.
MRN 90.47 73.80 80.95 83.33 83.33

Table 3: Classification performance of Spectrogram- 5 Conclusion

ANN approach on vibration data
In the present study, a prototype of an expert system
for fault diagnosis of single cylinder four stroke IC en-
and the charge coil charges the battery. The actual im-
gine using spectrogram for visualization of the fault
age of the stator part on which rotor rotates is shown in
patterns and feature extraction of vibration signals for
Figure 10. The gaps around the pulsar coil are fixed.
different faults, features classification and fault diag-
nosis using artificial neural network is presented. The
approach improves the conventional method which is
performed according to the experience of technician.
The conventional method is time consuming and per-
sonal wasting approach. The propose approach is au-
tomatic and online fault diagnosis system that that can
improve the cost of fault diagnosis system and reduce
human error.

Acknowledgment
The research presented in this paper was supported by
Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment
Council (TIFAC), Department of Science and Tech-
nology (DST), Government of India, under the project
Figure 10: Stator number TIFAC/EE/20070174.

In the faulty condition this gap decreases and the coil

starts rubbing and hence it produces a noise which is
known as magneto rotor noise. This noise can also be
generated if the pulsar coil’s screws are loose, but this
is a very rare condition.
4 Results
This section presents the classification results for
faults of IC engine using Spectrogram-ANN tech-
nique. For each of the six faults and normal categories
features (as discussed in section 2) were extracted. In
all, 600 acoustic signals were collected for different
faults out of which 400 acoustic signals were used for
training the neural network and features of remaining
200 acoustic signals were used for testing. Classifica-
tion accuracy corresponding to all four sensors placed
at four different positions are shown in Table 3. As
summarized in Table 3 , all the testing results have
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