Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing (2001) 15(6), 1165}1184

doi:10.1006/mssp. 2000.1366, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

A STUDY OF THE NOISE FROM DIESEL ENGINES
USINGTHE INDEPENDENTCOMPONENTANALYSIS
W. LI, F. GU, A. D. BALL, A. Y. T. LEUNG AND C. E. PHIPPS
Maintenance Engineering, Manchester School of Engineering, University of Manchester,
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K.
(Received 16 November 1999, accepted 3 October 2000)
In this paper the independent component analysis (ICA) is applied to engine acoustic
signals to identify the engine noise sources. The ICA decomposes the signals into a number
of independent components (ICs) so the individual engine acoustic sources can be studied
separately. The theoretical description of the characteristics of the diesel engine noise
sources is introduced "rst. The predictive models indicate that the engine noise generation
mechanisms follow the same principle as that of the ICA model. The relevant theory and
properties of the ICA model are outlined next. A numerical example is presented to verify
the separation e$ciency of the ICA. The numerical example shows that the ICA can
e!ectively separate the embedded low-level sources. A single set of microphone system is
then used to measure the acoustic signals and a sequential ICA model is developed to work
with the measurements. The continuous wavelet transform(CWT) is applied to represent the
ICs in the time}frequency domain. The source separation results from the recorded acoustic
signals are in accordance with theoretical predictions and engine design speci"cations.
2001 Academic Press
1. INTRODUCTION
The study of engine noise has been carried out since the early stages of engine development.
In 1931, Ricardo "rst found a descriptive relationship between the combustion pressure rise
and the noise produced [1]. Later, a number of parameters in determining the noise
development were investigated which include the "rst and second derivatives of cylinder
pressure. These methods were e!ective in revealing the relationship between engine
combustion and noise. Some of them still play an important role in identifying the sources
of engine noise [2].
Although there are a number of engine noise sources, one of the most fundamentals is the
combustion-induced noise [3]. It occurs towards the end of the compression stroke and
subsequent expansion stroke. The rapid pressure change due to the combustion transmits
through engine structures and forms a part of the airborne noise. This pressure change also
causes the vibration of the engine components such as the cylinder head, pistons, connecting
rods and engine body. The vibration of these components then provides another part of the
overall engine noise. Together these noise sources account for over 80% of total engine
noise. The combustion-induced noise is however the dominant source. It occurs around the
top dead centre (TDC).
Other noise sources are due to engine functions such as the injection of fuel and the
operation of inlet and exhaust valves. These sources usually produce low level noise and
make up a fraction of the overall noise. Yet all have designated times of occurrence in terms
of crank angles. For instance, fuel injection is usually performed around 8}103 before the
TDC in the compression stroke. The exact instances of these events depend on the
individual design of the diesel engines.
0888}3270/01/061165#20 $35.00/0 2001 Academic Press
Although the above engine noise sources have distinctive time instances, it is still di$cult to
resolve them accurately based on noise measurement. This is because the occurrences of each
noise source are too close together. Avariety of signal processing methods including statistical
analysis, spectral analysis, time}frequency analysis and wavelet transform have been used to
analyse engine noise [4}6]. These methods are applied to investigate the noise-generation
mechanisms and to reveal the individual features of the sources. Each method is based upon
component energy contributions to retrieve information about engine noise. Firstly, the noise
signals are represented by using either the time domain, frequency domain or the joint
time}frequency domain. The noise sources are then identi"ed by the energy variations of the
represented signals. As such methods are all based on energy conservation, they are useful
for "nding predominant information such as combustion peaks.
The other low-level noise sources cannot be identi"ed successfully, using the methods
mentioned above. This is because these methods retain the signal energy information from
one domain to another. The low-energy noise sources are either buried by the combustion
events or too small to be recognised. Hence, these signal energy conservation based
methods are unable to recognise such noises induced by fuel injections or valve movements,
which contain relatively small energy.
The independent component analysis (ICA) brings a di!erent strategy in dealing with the
problems of blind source separation (BSS). In the ICA it is assumed that the measured data
is a linear combination of the indirectly observed latent sources. As long as the latent signals
are statistically independent the ICA should be able to decompose them into independent
components (ICs) successfully. It has been reported recently that the ICA is an e!ective
approach for analysing brain electroencephalogram (EEG) data, image processing, feature
extraction, telecommunications and "nancial applications [7}9].
However, the applications of the ICA to the analysis of mechanical signals such as
vibration and sound have been little investigated. This paper focuses mainly on the study of
the acoustic signals generated from a test diesel engine using the ICA in an e!ort to identify
its noise sources. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 describes the theoretical
models characterising diesel engine noise generation mechanisms, transmission paths and
radiation. The principles, properties and implementation issues of the ICA are presented in
Section 3. The numerical example using the ICA with simulated signals is given in Section 4.
Section 5 illustrates the separation results from the measured acoustic signals. The results
are then veri"ed from a number of ways. Section 6 summarises the conclusions obtained
through this initial work.
2. DESCRIPTION OF ENGINE NOISE SOURCES
It is well accepted that the major noise sources in internal combustion engines include the
following categories: combustion-related process, mechanical movements, intake and
exhaust systems [1, 10]. The "rst two categories can be studied with the same linear system.
The di!erence is in the nature of the excitation forces. The intake and exhaust systems can
be modelled similarly with di!erence in their source characteristics.
2.1. THE COMBUSTION AND MECHANICAL INDUCED NOISE
The structure of a diesel engine can be simpli"ed to a one-degree-of-freedom system as
shown in Fig. 1(a) [1]. The equivalent electrical circuit of the model is given in Fig. 1(b).
In the case of the combustion-induced noise, the acting force is composed of the gas
excitation, inertia and friction forces. The mechanical-induced noise model considers the
reversible force due to the engine crank mechanism and inertia force.
1166 W. LI E A.
Figure 1. The combustion and mechanical-induced noise model: (a) simpli"ed mechanical model; (b) equivalent
electrical circuit.
The mechanical impedance of the above model is given by
Z
K
"R#j (cM!K/c). (1)
Its resonance frequency is obtained when the above imaginary part is zero as
f

"
1
2
K
M
. (2)
In practice, a diesel engine has numerous resonance frequencies because most mechanical
parts inside the engine can be simulated by the above model [11]. For example, the
theoretical analysis indicates that the crankcase walls may have more than 20 resonance
frequencies in a narrow-frequency band. The system responses are rather complex. One of
the reasons is due to the numerous numbers of the excitation forces. Another reason is that
most of the excitation forces are the non-stationary impacts in nature. Hence, the overall
system response is a combination of all the individual responses expressed as [12].
x(t)"
K

G
f
G
(t)
*
h
G
(t)#
L

H
<
H
w
H
(t)#n(t) (3)
where f
G
(t), i"1,
2
, m, are the steady-state excitation forces with the corresponding
transfer functions h
G
(t). The second term represents the response from the impacting
sources. <
H
are the independent impulsive intensities and w
H
(t) are the impacting sources.
Random noise n(t) is also added here.
Experimental results show that the resonance frequencies of engine structures are
between 800 Hz and 3 kHz. The spectra of the excitation forces show that the main energy
lies more or less within this frequency band [11]. Hence, it can be deduced that both the
combustion- and mechanical-induced noise has the predominant components in this band.
This is con"rmed by the time}frequency analysis of combustion chamber resonance
frequencies of diesel engines [13]. The chamber has a number of resonance frequencies of
which the components around 3 kHz are predominant.
2.2. THE INTAKE AND EXHAUST NOISE
The intake and exhaust systems can be modelled using the pressure source as shown in
Fig. 2 [14, 15].
In this model, P
Q
and u
Q
represent the source pressure and volume velocity, Z
Q
is the
internal impedance of the source, p

and u

are the volume pressure and velocity before

adding the acoustical load (mu%er) while p

and u

are the corresponding pressure and

1167 STUDY OF ENGINE NOISE
Figure 2. The equivalent electrical circuit representation of the intake and exhaust systems.
velocity at the other end of the load. The four-pole coe$cients A, B, C and D represent the
transfer characteristics of the mu%er. Z
P
is called the radiation impedance.
Under the plane wave assumption, the propagation of the source pressure can be
calculated by
p

"
Z

#Z
Q
p
Q
(4)
where Z

is the input or system impedance.

The relationship between the pressures and velocities before and after the acoustical load
can be repressed linearly as

"

A B
C D
p

. (5)
The determination of the transfer coe$cients can be carried out by comparing the wave
propagation characteristics between di!erent acoustical loads. Rossing and Fletcher gave
the explicit expressions of the coe$cients for the mu%er with uniform pipe in which the
coe$cients were determined by the pipe dimensions and its characteristic impedance [16].
Sridhara and Crocker, using experimental procedures, predicted the radiated sound pres-
sure from the source [17].
The frequency responses of the intake and exhaust noise consist of two frequency bands:
the low- and high-frequency band [16]. The low-frequency band responses are mostly
under 1 kHz. Both theoretical and experimental results have shown that they are related to
engine "ring frequency and its harmonics [15, 18}20]. However, it is often di$cult to
distinguish them from the acoustic signals as the frequency band contains many other
mechanical-related responses. The high-frequency band responses extend from 1 kHz up to
several kHz [14]. Comparatively the prediction accuracy at this high-frequency band is
limited due to the in#uence of combustion- and mechanical-induced noise.
The above engine noise sources have been investigated extensively by means of vibration and
pressure analysis in which the measurements are taken carefully so that the interference from
other sources is as minimal as possible. On the other hand, the practical acoustic measurements
inevitably contain all possible sources which makes it more challenging to study the engine
noise sources from the acoustic signals for the purpose of condition monitoring.
3. OUTLINE OF THE INDEPENDENT COMPONENT ANALYSIS
3.1. BACKGROUND OF THE ICA
The idea of the ICA derives from the well-known cocktail-party problem [7, 8]. The
scenario described by this problem imagines two persons are talking constantly with each
1168 W. LI E A.
other in an anechoic room while two microphones are placed in the room to record the
sound signals. If the speech signals by the two speakers are denoted by s

(t) and s

(t)
respectively, the recordings by the microphones x

(t) and x

(t) are the linear combination

of the speech signals as
x

(t)"a

(t)#a

(t)
x

(t)"a

(t)#a

(t).
(6)
The parameters a
GH
on the right-hand side depend on the microphone distances and room
acoustics. It can be seen that this model is similar to the engine intake and exhaust system
model as shown in equation (5). In this particular situation, only the microphone recordings
are available. It is supposed that the speech signals are unobserved except that they are
statically independent. The transfer matrix is also unknown but invertible.
The cocktail-party problem is concerned with the separation of the unobserved latent
speech signals s

(t) and s

(t) from only the microphone recordings. This classic cocktail-

party problem implies the idea of blind source separation (BSS): recovering the original
latent source signals from the measured mixtures. The term blind means both the mixing
process and the latent sources are unknown. That is true in the measurement of the diesel
engine acoustic signals in which both the noise sources and their mixing process could not
be determined mathematically. The only a priori knowledge is the assumption that the
sources are statistically independent.
The term blind source (or signal) separation was "rst put forward by Herault et al. in the
early 1980s [21]. The ICA, considered as an extension of the principal component analysis
(PCA) and underlying principle of the BSS, was also addressed by the same authors.
Common is the "rst pioneer laying the mathematical foundations of the ICA [21]. The ICA
has been developed so successfully and become a mainstream in the BSS that the terms of
the ICA and BSS are often used indi!erently [22, 23]. This means they often refer to the
same de"nition, model, and implementation algorithm.
3.2. FORMULATION OF THE ICA MODEL
Expanding from equation (6) and rewriting it in vector}matrix format gives
x"As (7)
where the source vector s"[s

(t),
2
, s
L
(t)]2 is composed of n statistically independent
source components. A is a m;n matrix called the mixing matrix. In practice both the
latent source vector and the mixing matrix are unobservable. The output vector
x"[x

(t),
2
, x
K
(t)]2 is the only available observation by m sensors.
The aim of the ICA is to "nd a so-called demixing or separating matrix W
L
;
K
so that the
latent sources can be recovered as
y"Wx"WAs (8)
where y"[y

(t),
2
, y
L
(t)]2 is the separated source vector.
The core problem of the BSS and the ICA can be stated as: given m independent
realisations of the observation vector x, "nd an estimate of the inverse of the mixing matrix
[24]. However, the problem is that the mixing matrix is unknown at all or it may not exist.
This explains why the conventional algebraic methods are precluded. Also it should be
noted that the estimated vector y is called a copy of the source vector s [22]. The copy
implies that the two vectors are not exactly the same. Their di!erences will be addressed in
the next section.
The process of the ICA can be illustrated in the block diagram shown in Fig. 3 [24].
1169 STUDY OF ENGINE NOISE
Figure 3. The principle of the ICA model.
3.3. PROPERTIES OF THE ICA
To realise the ICA, a number of assumptions are placed on both the mixing matrix and
sources signals.
3.3.1. Sources are statistically independent
If the probability density function (PDF) of the individual source entry is denoted as
p
G
(s
G
), independence implies the joint PDF is the product of the marginal PDFs as
p(s)"
L
_
G
p
G
(s
G
). (9)
The independence assumption is important for the ICA model to perform e!ectively.
Source signal independence means one entry of a source signal provides no further
information about any other entries. Hence, under this assumption it is possible to separate
sources one by one.
3.3.2. Sources are non-Gaussian
If individual source signals have Gaussian distributions, the joint distribution looks more
like a Gaussian distribution than any one entry. The problem with the Gaussian distribu-
tions is that the joint distribution is invariant under most common linear transformations
as used in the ICA [22]. This implies that the Gaussian distributed signals are inseparable.
However, if only one entry of the source signal vector has a Gaussian distribution, then the
ICA still works [8]. It has been reported that, in many practical situations, the sources with
super-Gaussian and sub-Gaussian distributions can be separated by the ICA [7, 9]. In fact,
this non-Gaussian distribution requirement adversely a!ects the applications of the ICA to
the analysis of a majority of mechanical signals in which Gaussian distributions are
commonly assumed.
3.3.3. Energy information is distorted
As shown in equation (7), the observed signals are the linear transformation of the
original source signals. The energy information has been changed by multiplication of the
mixing matrix. In order to restore statistical independence, the recovering matrix is ap-
plied in equation (8), hence, the energy information is further distorted. That is why the
restored vector y in equation (8) is called a copy of s. This means the recovered vector is
a modi"ed version of the source vector up to permutation, changes of scales and signs.
This restriction is bene"cial in identifying low-level events. In diesel engines, for instance,
there are a number of events such as valve operations that are rather small in energy
compared with combustion events. Under traditional analysis such as time}frequency
transforms, these small energy events are either buried by combustion events or too small to
1170 W. LI E A.
be identi"ed. As the ICA disregards signal energy information, it is expected the ICA may
reveal some di!erent information.
3.4. THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE ICA ALGORITHM
The aim of the ICA is to restore statistical independence of the observed data by
estimating the demixing matrix. This can be achieved by optimising contrast functions with
respect to the elements of the matrix. Currently, there are a number of contrast functions in
use including negentropy, information maximisation, maximum likelihood and high-order
cumulants. In this paper, the information maximisation method has been adopted because
of its fast computation and convergence.
This method is derived from the neural network models in which the observed signals
are taken as networks inputs. After the transformation by the demixing matrix, the outputs
are supposed to be statistically independent. The joint entropy of the network outputs
are de"ned as [9]
H(y

,
2
, y
L
)"H(y

)#2#H(y
L
)!I(y,
2
, y
L
) (10)
where H(y
G
) is the marginal entropy of the output entry and I(y

,
2
, y
L
) is the mutual
information between output entries. It can be seen from the above equation that maxi-
mising the joint entropy implies the maximisation of individual entropies and the
minimisation of the mutual information. Minimum mutual information of the output
entries is the same as statistical independence. It has been shown that, in most practical
cases, the maximum joint entropy almost guarantees the minimum mutual information or
statistical independence [9]. Hence, the algorithm is to maximise the joint entropy with
respect to the weights so as to obtain the minimum mutual information.
Typically, in neural networks, the outputs are derived through a monotonically non-
linear function together with the added noise as y"g(u)#n. The hidden layer output u is
the linear combination of the inputs and weights, so u"Wx.
The joint entropy is de"ned as
H(y)"!Elog p(y) (11)
where E
E
is used to obtain the expectation value and p(y) is the joint PDF of the output
vector. The relationship between the joint PDFs for the input and the output vectors is [25]
p(y)"
p(x)
J
(12)
where J is the absolute value of the Jacobian transformation and
J"det

cy

cx

2
cy

cx
L

cy
L
cx

2
cy
L
cx
L

. (13)
Substituting equations (12) and (13) into equation (11) gives
H(y)"Elog J!Elog p(x). (14)
As the PDF of the input vector does not depend on the weights and the non-linear
function, the second term in the above equation can be eliminated from the optimisation
process.
1171 STUDY OF ENGINE NOISE
From the neural network point of view, the Jacobian transformation can be decomposed
as [9]
J"det (W)
L
_
G

cy
G
cu
G

. (15)
The maximisation of the joint entropy can be obtained by calculating the derivative of the
joint entropy in equation (14) with respect to the weight vector and ignoring the second
term. Also, taking the expectation of E
E
does not a!ect the derivative and can be ignored.
We then have
cH(y)
cW
"
c
cW
log J
"
c
cW
log det(W)#
L

G
c
cW
log

cy
G
cu
G

. (16)
The above equation can be further simpli"ed as
AWJ
cH(y)
cW
"(W2)\#

cp(u)/cu
p(u)
x2. (17)
The weights can be adjusted according to equation (17) so that the mutual information is
minimised and the joint entropy is maximised. This derives the core implementation
algorithm of the ICA. One of the most successful applications of information maximisation
was used by Bell and Sejnowski [9], in which they separated the mixed signals from 10
speakers. Lee et al. used the extended information maximisation algorithm to separate 20
signals of the EEG data with di!erent distributions and the artifacts [26].
4. NUMERICAL STUDY
To prove the validity of the proposed ICA method, a numerical example is given in this
section to demonstrate how the ICA works and its relevant properties.
Figure 4 shows the four simulated source signals and their arti"cial mixtures. The "rst
two are sinusoidal signals with frequencies of 5 and 10 Hz, respectively. Both of them have
the same unit amplitude. The two transients are simulated using steady sinusoidal signals
multiplied with exponentially decaying functions. The steady oscillation frequencies are 25
and 30 Hz. The decaying rates are set at 4 and 8 so that the "rst transient lasts a little longer
than the second one. Their starting positions are located at 2 and 4 s, respectively.
In this example the two transients are supposed to be the interested low-level sources.
Their energy levels, in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), are calculated with respect to
the sinusoidal signals. In this case, the SNR ratios between the sinusoidal signals and the
two transients are 33 and 36 dB, respectively.
The mixing matrix A is a random matrix whose elements are chosen from uniformly
distributed random numbers within 0 and 1 as shown in the following equation:
A"

0.7335 0.4523 0.8681 0.5104

0.5188 0.3971 0.7344 0.9147
0.8958 0.6002 0.3710 0.1358
0.8959 0.9662 0.8349 0.4223

. (18)
The mixed results in Fig. 4(b) give little information about the individual sources.
Performing the Fourier analysis reveals that all the mixed signals have similar spectra in
1172 W. LI E A.
Figure 4. The simulated source signals and their mixtures: (a) source signals; (b) uniform mixtures.
which the two carrying frequencies 5 and 10 Hz dominate in the spectra. On the other hand,
the transients are completely mixed together in spectra with rather low amplitudes.
The ICA separated results are shown in Fig. 5. Comparing the separated results with the
source signals in Fig. 4(a), a number of di!erences can be found. First, the sequence is no
longer the same as the originals. In fact, the new sequence is arranged according to the
descending order of the eigenvalues. Second, the amplitudes are ampli"ed to some extent
due to weight adjustments of the demixing matrix implying the original energy information
has lost. Also each IC contains only one source indicating the sources are separated.
The demixing matrix is given in equation (19). Using the singular-value decomposition
(SVD), it can be found that the four eigenvalues are 326.37, 88.28, 5.95 and 0.71:
W"

!174.12 93.87 119.53 !31.33

!141.36 190.01 46.51 !40.79
!2.12 !1.12 !1.40 3.79
!0.87 !0.17 !3.30 2.53

. (19)
To test the separation capability of the ICA, a number of experiments are carried out with
di!erent SNRs, the results are listed in Table 1. Besides the SNRs, three parameters are used
to justify the separation e$ciency. They are the condition numbers of the mixing and
demixing matrices and the global rejection index (GRI). The GRI is a measure of the
diagonality of a matrix and calculated as [24, 27]
GRI"
L

G

L

H
p
GH

max
I
p
GI

!1

#
L

H

L

G
p
GH

max
I
p
IG

!1

(20)
where p
GH
are the elements of the product matrix (WA)
L
;
V
. A large index implies the matrix
elements are less concentrated on the principal diagonal.
1173 STUDY OF ENGINE NOISE
Figure 5. The separation results by the ICA.
TABLE 1
Parameters characterising the separation e.ciency
SNR1 SNR2 Cond (A) Cond (W) GRI Separated?
(dB) (dB) (Yes/no)
19 22 42 94 0.13 Yes
39 42 25 957 1.08 Yes
59 62 13 8294 0.52 Yes
79 82 18 1.05e#5 0.85 Yes
99 102 43 2.31e#6 0.20 Yes
119 122 26 7.75e#6 0.41 Yes
131 134 21 1.04e#7 0.53 No
From Table 1 it can be seen that with the increase of the SNRs or the decrease of transient
energy levels the condition number of the demixing matrix increases proportionally. The
other two parameters show no signi"cant changes. The reason is that the mixing matrix is
randomly generated hence its condition number has nothing to do with the separation
result. It only shows that the mixing process is reasonable in practice. When the SNR is over
130 dB, the ICA is able to separate, at most, three ICs in which the two transients are
grouped together. This is obviously due to the fact the transients are far too small.
The large condition number in conventional algebra implies unstable solution due to
perturbation. Here in the ICA, it produces both very large and very small eigenvalues. The
ICs with far too small eigenvalues may be regarded as non-ICs and deleted from the
algorithm. Hence fewer number of the ICs may be separated than expected.
It is noted from this example that although the ICA is energy information ignorant, too
small sources compared with others are either unable to be separated or grouped with other
sources. This demonstrates that the ICA is, by no means, able to separate the sources with
whatever small energy levels.
5. ENGINE NOISE SOURCE IDENTIFICATION
In this section, the ICA will be employed to investigate the separation of diesel engine
noise sources.
1174 W. LI E A.
TABLE 2
A list of engine noise sources around cylinder C1
Events Cylinder C3 Cylinder C1 Cylinder C2 Cylinder C4
Combustion * 03 * *
(CB)
Fuel injection * !103 * *
(FI)
Piston slap * #53 * *
(PS)
Exhaust valve !513 * * *
open (EO)
Inlet valve * * * !133
open (IO)
Exhaust valve * * * #133
close (EC)
Inlet valve * * #393 *
close (IC)
5.1. ENGINE NOISE CHARACTERISTICS
In four-stroke diesel engines, there are a number of possible noise radiation sources such
as combustion, valve impacts and piston slaps. These sources are all short time duration
and occur at "xed instances regarding the angular position of the crankshaft. The combus-
tion event, for instance, happens once around the TDC at 03 and then every 7203 turned by
the crank. Each impact by the closing of the exhaust valve begins at 133 before the TDC.
These individual space distributions of the engine sources satisfy the source independence
requirement of the ICA. Table 2 lists some of these noise sources within $903 interval of
the TDC of cylinder C1 only. Similarly there are equal numbers of the above events around
the other three cylinders.
As has been discussed in Section 3.3.2, the ICA requires the source signals are
non-Gaussian distributed. Hence, it is necessary to verify the engine source distribution
characteristics before applying the ICA. Because the linear transformation (mixing) does
not a!ect source distribution characteristics, it is enough to check with the measured
acoustic signals. One simple way to justify the Gaussianity is to calculate the normalised
kurtosis [7}9]. If this value is greater than 0 the signal is labelled as super-Gaussian and if
less than 0 it is called sub-Gaussian. The Gaussian distributed signal has a kurtosis value
close to 0.
The normalised kurtosis is de"ned as the standardised fourth-order cumulant [28],
K"c

(0, 0, 0)/o (21)

where c

is the fourth-order cumulant and o is the variance.

A comparison result of the normalised kurtosis between the simulated Gaussian distri-
butions and the measured acoustic signals is shown in Fig. 6. In this "gure, the Gaussian
distribution signals are generated from normally distributed random numbers with zero
mean and unit variance. The acoustic signals are measured from the test engine under
di!erent speed and load conditions with a total of 160 measurements. During the measure-
ments, the speed ranged from 1000 to 2500 rpm and the load was increased from 0 to
60 Nm. It can be seen that the normalised kurtosis values of Gaussian distributed signals
are very close to zero as expected. On the other hand, the kurtosis values for the acoustic
1175 STUDY OF ENGINE NOISE
Figure 6. The comparison of signal Gaussianity by normalised kurtosis: ........., Gaussian distributions; **,
acoustic signals.
Figure 7. Two types of the ICA models: (a) the conventional parallel model; (b) the proposed sequential model.
signals are much lower. In fact, the mean kurtosis values are !0.0021 for Gaussian
distributions and !0.3317 for the acoustic signals, respectively. This indicates that most
acoustic data sets are sub-Gaussian distributed. Therefore, the ICA is expected to work with
the measured acoustic data.
5.2. THE SEQUENTIAL ICA MODEL
The conventional ICA model requires that the number of sensors have to be larger than
the number of sources to be separated. This means that a number of microphones are
needed to resolve the engine sound sources. This is not practical for on-line machine
condition monitoring due to their high costs. To avoid using multi-microphone systems,
this study introduces a sequential ICA model for analysis of engine noise.
As shown in Fig. 7(a), the conventional ICA model is a parallel one implying there is no
time delay between the source signals and the observations. The elements of the mixing
matrix A depend on the transfer path characteristics from the sources to the measuring
positions. However, this needs large number of sensors. The proposed sequential model is
illustrated in Fig. 7(b).
The di!erence between the two models lies in their mixing processes. First in the parallel
model, the mixing process can be expanded from equation (7) as
x
G
(k)"
L

H
a
GH
s
H
(k) (22)
1176 W. LI E A.
where k"1,
2
, N are the data samples. The physical implication of the parallel model is
that the measured signals, recorded by di!erent sensors at a particular time, are linearly
mixed together due to the di!erent transfer paths from the sources to the measuring points.
Hence, the mixing matrix depends on the physical characteristics of the transmission paths.
On the other hand, the mixing process of the sequential model in Fig. 7(b) is given by
x
G
(k)"
L

H
b
(t
G
)
H
s
H
(k) (23)
where b
(t
G
)
H
represents the transfer path from source s
H
to the single measuring point while t
G
indicates the time when segment x
G
is being measured. The sequential model takes the time
delays between the measured data segments into account. The delay is determined by the
measurement interval (t
G>
!t
G
) between two data segments. In practice, the interval
(t
G>
!t
G
) is much longer than the data collection time due to test rig adjustments. Hence, it
is reasonable to assume that the mixing elements in equation (23) may vary, to some extent,
over time. One of the reasons is that diesel engines, like other machines, contain a large
number of random processes which could change the transmission characteristics more or
less all the time. From the above comparison it can be found that although the physical
transmission paths from the sources to the measuring point are the same over all the
measurements, the values of the mixing elements are by no means the same. This is due to
the small variations of the system transmission characteristics over time.
Rearranging the mixing elements according to the sequence of measurement gives
B"

b
(t
G
)

2 b
(t
G
)
L

b
(t
K
)

2 b
(t
K
)
L

. (24)
It can be seen that the mixing matrix of the sequential model is similar to that of the
parallel model. This implies that the sequential model has the same physical implications as
the conventional parallel model in terms of the mixing matrices.
However, there is still one more point to be clari"ed before applying the ICA algorithm:
how could the ICA deal with the time delays from the sequential measurements? For this
question, Bell and Sejnowski [9] proposed a learning rule for the data with time delay. The
strategy is to maximise the output entropy with respect to the time delay so that the delays
are adapted along the direction in which similar signals are lined up in time. Hence, the time
delays are cancelled while the independent source information is retained.
5.3. REPRESENTATION OF THE ICA SIGNALS
In the ICA applications, the results are usually presented in the time domain. Lee et al.
used the extended Infomax ICA algorithm to separate the eye blink events from the EEG
data [26]. After the ICA separation, the eye blink events were clearly shown in one of the
decomposed ICs in the time domain. Since the sources are simple in contents, the time
domain representation is su$cient to show the required information. For engine noise
signals, however, the time domain decomposed ICs are no more informative than the
measured acoustic signals.
Theoretically, each decomposed IC should contain at least one component correspond-
ing to one of the physical sources. For diesel engines, this component may be one of the
impulsive sources. These types of noise sources produce sound signals of short duration and
wide frequency bands. Such signals then need time}frequency transforms to resolve them
properly. It has been shown that the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) has better
time}frequency localisation, higher resolution and is faster in computation [5]. To
1177 STUDY OF ENGINE NOISE
Figure 8. The IC of the combustion in cylinder C1.
investigate the features of engine noise sources, the CWT is used in this study to post-
process the ICs. The IC is represented as
>
G
(a, b)"
1
a
j y
G
(t)

t!b
a
dt, i"1,
2
, m (25)
where (
E
) is called mother wavelet with dilation and translation parameters a and b. The
Morlet wavelet is used here due to its high localisation in both the time and the frequency
domains.
5.4. THE RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The acoustic signal was obtained in an engine test laboratory. The engine is a four-
cylinder in-line direct injection diesel engine. The combustion sequence of the engine has the
arranged cylinder order 3}1}2}4. In this section, only the events listed in Table 2 are
attempted to be separated.
The microphone was positioned 1 m away from the engine. The measured acoustic data
was then fed into the sequential ICA model to estimate the independent noise sources.
Afterwards, the results from the ICA were then post-processed using the CWT and
presented in three-dimensional plots to give a more vivid image of the events. Also,
a two-dimensional contour plot was drawn to show the more accurate time}frequency
locations of the events.
Figure 8 illustrates the combustion-related noise source in the time}frequency plane.
Judging from the time location of the main peak that occurs around the TDC, it can be
deduced that this event is caused by the combustion of the "rst cylinder. Its frequency
response as shown in the contour plot is around 2 kHz which is within the engine structure
resonance frequency band.
1178 W. LI E A.
Figure 9. The IC of the piston slap in cylinder C1.
There are also a number of other small components as shown in the "gure. This is due to
the fact that the ICA focuses only on the separation of the major components by reaching
the maximum independence. As has been demonstrated in Section 4, when a signal is far too
small than the others, it might not be separated but mixed together with others. In fact, even
in most medical applications, in which the sources are rather simple, the ICA is unable to
separate them completely.
The engine piston slap event of cylinder C1 is represented in Fig. 9. This event happens
soon after the combustion around 53 after the TDC. Its frequency position is around 2 kHz
which is close to the combustion event. Under the conventional time-frequency analysis, it
is di$cult to identify this event due to its close time}frequency position to that of the
combustion event. Here the ICA separates this event although it possesses rather small
energy level.
The fuel injection process of cylinder C1 occurs about 103 before the TDC for the test
engine. This event is revealed in Fig. 10. From this "gure it is also noted that there is another
event around 503 before the TDC which is, in fact, from the exhaust valve opening of
cylinder C3. This demonstrates that part of a component may be included in another
decomposed IC.
The inlet valve-opening source of cylinder C4 is given in Fig. 11. This event happens
around 133 before the TDC. It can be seen from this "gure that although it is very close to
the occurrence of the fuel injection event as shown in Fig. 10, it is separated by the ICA from
the fuel injection event. This shows the unique separation capability of the ICA in
identifying neighbouring events.
The exhaust valve opening related event of cylinder C3 is shown in Fig. 12. As listed in
Table 2, this event occurs at 513 before the TDC. The frequency range of this event is located
between 1 and 2 kHz. This frequency band contains the high frequency components of the
intake and exhaust noise.
1179 STUDY OF ENGINE NOISE
Figure 10. The IC of the fuel injection in cylinder C1.
Figure 11. The IC of the inlet valve opening in cylinder C4.
As has been shown in Table 1, the condition number of the demixing matrix indicates the
stability of the separation results. The condition number of the demixing matrix for the
above separation is only 7.98. This shows that the ICA separation process is fairly stable
and is unlikely to have been a!ected by small source perturbations.
1180 W. LI E A.
Figure 12. The IC of the exhaust value opening in cylinder C3.
TABLE 3
he noise source separation error
Source CB PS FI IO EO EC IC
SNR 32 44 27 32 36 30 34
(dB)
In a similar manner as above, the other events such as exhaust valve closing (#133) and
inlet valve closing (#393) events as listed in Table 2 have also been identi"ed. Performing
the ICA with the acoustic data around the other cylinders produces more or less the same
results.
To verify the separation errors, the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) between the main
component in each of the above "gures and the low-level artifacts are calculated and given
in Table 3. First in Table 3, the high SNR values indicate that the main components
dominate in their respective separation results. Second, the SNR levels correspond to the
visual inspection of the above "gures. For instance, the piston slap event has the highest
SNRin Table 3 while in Fig. 9 it can be found that the artifacts are rather small as compared
with the main component. In general, the above separation errors are quite small in terms of
the SNR levels.
However, it has been observed that there are events that could not be attributed to any
known sources as given in Table 2. This suggests that there are other engine noise sources
yet to be identi"ed. It is also noted from the above discussion that most separated noise
sources have frequency response range around 2 kHz. Although this frequency information
gives little help in determining the individual noise sources, it con"rms with previous
1181 STUDY OF ENGINE NOISE
theoretical and experimental works stating that engine noise sources do have high-
frequency responses within this band. On the other hand, the time domain provides crucial
information in identifying the sources. This is due to the fact that engine movements have
unique time or crank-related information.
6. CONCLUSIONS
The independent component analysis is presented in this paper as a novel method for engine
acoustic source identi"cation. The ICA is di!erent from the conventionally used acoustic
signal processing methods in that it separates individual sources based on their statistical
independence. As engine noise signals are a combination of a number of possible sources
and background noise, the ICA can be a useful tool to identify these sources individually
and to study them in detail.
The theoretical analysis of engine's major noise source characteristics indicated that they
extended from a few dozens of hertz to several kilohertz. This fact has been con"rmed by
a large amount of experimental works. The low-frequency band is often dominated by
engine "ring frequency and its harmonics making it di$cult to study the noise sources in
detail. The high-frequency band is also a combination of various source responses. This
paper focused on the separation of noise sources among this frequency band by the ICA. In
particular, the noise generation mechanisms of intake and exhaust systems follow a similar
principle to that of the ICA in which the observations are the linear mixtures of the sources.
The ICA is a unique and e$cient blind signal separation strategy by emphasising the
statistical independence among the sources. This is very helpful in identifying embedded
low-level events such as transients which are very common in diesel engines. The numerical
example by the ICA demonstrated that the unknown mixed sources could be successfully
recovered even with rather small energy levels. The example also provided some guidance in
justifying its separation e$ciency.
Before applying the proposed ICA method, the acoustic signals were tested with the
normalised kurtosis. This simple index is able to reveal the extent of the Gaussian
distribution which is precluded from the ICA algorithm. It was found that a majority of the
acoustic signals had sub-Gaussian distributions to which the ICA could be applied. Also the
sequential ICA model was proposed to suit the single microphone measurement situation.
The algorithm is able to cancel the time delay and rearrange the signals. This strategy
signi"cantly reduces the number of sensors as requested by the parallel model.
The results obtained by applying the ICA, together with the CWT, to the engine noise
signals demonstrate that the ICA is powerful in the retrieval of engine noise sources such as
combustion and valve operations. Nonetheless, it is obvious from the discussions in this
paper that the application of the ICA to other mechanical signals is limited due to its
non-Gaussian restriction on the sources.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors gratefully thank the "nancial supports from the Committee of Vice-Chancel-
lors and Principles (CVCP) in London and Manchester School of Engineering, Manchester.
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