Fault location in a marine low speed two stroke diesel engine using the characteristic curves method

When a malfunction occurs in a marine main engine system, the impact of the anomaly will propagate through the system, affecting the performance of all relevant components in the system. The phenomenon of fault propagation in the system caused by induced factors can interfere with fault localization, making the latter a difficult task to solve. This paper aims at showing how the “characteristic curves method” is able to properly locate malfunctions also when more malfunctions appear simultaneously. To this end, starting from the working principle of each component of a real marine diesel engine system, comprehensive and reasonable thermal performance parameters are chosen to describe their characteristic curves and include them in a one-dimensional thermodynamic model. In particular, the model of a low-speed two stroke MAN 6S50 MC-C8.1 diesel engine is built using the AVL Boost software and obtaining errors lower than 5% between simulated values and test bench data. The behavior of the engine is simulated considering eight multi-fault concomitant phenomena. On this basis, the fault diagnosis method proposed in this paper is verified. The results show that this diagnosis method can effectively isolate the fault propagation phenomenon in the system and quantify the additional irreversibility caused by the Induced factors. The fault diagnosis index proposed in this paper can quickly locate the abnormal components.