Spectral-Based Fault Detection Method in Marine Diesel Engine Operation

The possibility of developing autonomous vessels has recently become increasingly interesting. As most vessels are powered by diesel engines, the idea of developing a method to detect engine malfunctions by analyzing signals from microphones placed near the engine and accelerometers mounted on the engine housing is intriguing. This paper presents a method for detecting engine malfunctions by analyzing signals obtained from the output of a microphone and accelerometer. The algorithm is based on signal analysis in the frequency domain using discrete Fourier transform (DFT), and the same procedure is applied to both acoustic and vibration data. The proposed method was tested on a six-cylinder marine diesel engine where a fault was emulated by deactivating one cylinder. In controlled experiments across five rotational speeds, the method achieved an accuracy of approximately 98.3% when trained on 75 operating cycles and evaluated over 15 cycles. The average precision and recall across all sensors exceeded 97% and 96%, respectively. The ability of the algorithm to treat microphone and accelerometer signals identically simplifies implementation, and the detection accuracy can be increased further by adding additional sensors.