Vibration signals have the characteristics of multi-source strong shock coupling and strong noise interference owing to the complex structure of reciprocating machinery. Therefore, it is difficult to extract, analyze, and diagnose mechanical fault features. To accurately extract sensitive features from the strong noise interference and unsteady monitoring signals of reciprocating machinery, a study on the time-frequency feature extraction method of multi-source shock signals is conducted. Combining the characteristics of reciprocating mechanical vibration signals, a targeted optimization method considering the variational modal decomposition (VMD) mode number and second penalty factor is proposed, which completed the adaptive decomposition of coupled signals. Aiming at the bilateral asymmetric attenuation characteristics of reciprocating mechanical shock signals, a new bilateral adaptive Laplace wavelet (BALW) is established. A search strategy for wavelet local parameters of multi-shock signals is proposed using the harmony search (HS) method. A multi-source shock simulation signal is established, and actual data on the valve fault are obtained through diesel engine fault experiments. The fault recognition rate of the intake and exhaust valve clearance is above 90% and the extraction accuracy of the shock start position is improved by 10°.

Diesel engines, as power equipment, are widely used in the fields of the automobile industry, ship industry, and power equipment. Due to wear or faulty adjustment, the valve train clearance abnormal fault is a typical failure of diesel engines, which may result in the performance degradation, even valve fracture and cylinder hit fault. However, the failure mechanism features mainly in the time domain and angular domain, on which the current diagnosis methods are based, are easily affected by working conditions or are hard to extract accurate enough from, as the diesel engine keeps running in transient and non-stationary processes. This work aimed at diagnosing this fault mainly based on frequency band features, which would change when the valve clearance fault occurs. For the purpose of extracting a series of frequency band features adaptively, a decomposition technique based on improved variational mode decomposition was investigated in this work. As the connection between the features and the fault was fuzzy, the random forest algorithm was used to analyze the correspondence between features and faults. In addition, the feature dimension was reduced to improve the operation efficiency according to importance score. The experimental results under variable speed condition showed that the method based on variational mode decomposition and random forest was capable to detect the valve clearance fault effectively.