Diesel Engine Turbocharger Performance Monitoring Using Vibration Analysis

This work will present the use of vibration signal analysis as a tool to extract the physical characteristics of a turbocharger. It will also be shown that through this method it is possible to diagnose faults in a turbocharger. The methodology used consists of comparing the vibration signature of a turbocharger under normal operational conditions against that of the same turbocharger under a simulated fault. To extract the signature, Fourier spectra and envelope spectra of a turbocharger vibration signal were applied directly on the data sets recorded from an accelerometer fixed on the turbocharger. It was observed that there was a distinct difference between the signatures, conclusive evidence to the validity of this work and the effectiveness of the proposed method.