Improved deep residual shrinkage network for a multi-cylinder heavy-duty engine fault detection with single channel surface vibration

•An IDRSN method is proposed to diagnose multi-faults at various faulty degrees of diesel engine under different operating conditions.•The proposed diagnosis approach is validated experimentally using a diesel engine rig test by re-generating the corresponding fault at different degrees.•Visualized analysis shows good consistence between the learned feature and the fault-related information.•The proposed method shows high recognition rate, high stability, good anti-interference comparing with other popular algorithms. The health monitoring and fault diagnosis of heavy-duty engines are increasingly important for energy storage ecosystem. During operation, vibration characters corresponding to the specific fault need to be extracted from the overall system vibration. Faulty characteristics emanating from one single cylinder are also mixed with those from other cylinders. Besides, the change of working condition brings strong nonlinearities in surface vibration. To solve these problems, an improved deep residual shrinkage network (IDRSN) is developed for detecting diverse engine faults at various degrees using single channel surface vibration signal. Within IDRSN, a wide convolution kernel is utilized in first convolution layer to capture the long-term fault-related impacts and eliminate the short-time random impact. The residual network module is adopted to enhance the focus the relevant components of vibration signals. Mini-batch training strategy is used to improve the model stability. Meanwhile, Gradient-weighted class activation map is adopted to assess the consistency between the learned knowledge and the fault-related information. The IDRSN is implemented to diagnosing a diesel engine under various faults, faulty degrees and operating speeds. Comparisons with existing models are analyzed in terms of hyper-parameters, training samples, noise resistance, and visualization. Results demonstrate the proposed IDRSN's superior performance on fault diagnosis accuracy, stability, anti-noise performance, and anti-interference performance. An average accuracy rate of 98.38 % was achieved by the proposed IDRSN, in comparison to 96.64 % and 93.56 % achieved by the DRSN and the wide-kernel deep convolutional neural network respectively. These results highlight the proposed IDRSN's superiority in diagnosing multiple faults under various working conditions, offering a low-cost, highly effective, and applicable approach for complex fault diagnosis tasks. [Display omitt