Diesel engine fuel injection monitoring using acoustic measurements and independent component analysis

Air-borne acoustic based condition monitoring is a promising technique because of its intrusive nature and the rich information contained within the acoustic signals including all sources. However, the back ground noise contamination, interferences and the number of Internal Combustion Engine ICE vibro-acoustic sources preclude the extraction of condition information using this technique. Therefore, lower energy events; such as fuel injection, are buried within higher energy events and/or corrupted by background noise. This work firstly investigates diesel engine air-borne acoustic signals characteristics and the benefits of joint time-frequency domain analysis. Secondly, the air-borne acoustic signals in the vicinity of injector head were recorded using three microphones around the fuel injector (120° apart from each other) and an independent component analysis (ICA) based scheme was developed to decompose these acoustic signals. The fuel injection process characteristics were thus revealed in the time-frequency domain using Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) technique. Consequently the energy levels around the injection process period between 11° and 5° before the top dead centre and of frequency band 9-15 kHz are calculated. The developed technique was validated by simulated signals and empirical measurements at different injection pressure levels from 250 to 210 bars in steps of 10 bars. The recovered energy levels in the tested conditions were found to be affected by the injector pressure settings.