An automatic abrupt signal extraction method for fault diagnosis of aero-engines

Fault diagnosis of a mechanical device such as a complicated aero-engine system is an interesting engineering topic. Present paper aims at providing a method to automatically extract abrupt information of signals to diagnose typical faults. This proposed method is based on singular value decomposition (SVD), and it decomposes a signal via reconstruction of singular value matrix. A criterion of difference spectrum is introduced into this method to terminate the analysis procedure. To verify the proposed method, both numerical simulation and experimental work on rotor test rig and an aero-engine generator were carried out. In addition, the kurtosis of rubbing resulting from wavelet, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and this proposed method was compared. It is shown the proposed method is advanced to wavelet and EMD in rubbing fault diagnosis of aero-engines since it can extract the most significant periodic impact feature of fault signals.