AI/ML Based Anomaly Detection and Fault Diagnosis of Turbocharged Marine Diesel Engines: Experimental Study on Engine of an Operational Vessel

Turbocharged diesel engines are widely used for the propulsion and as the generators for powering auxiliary systems in marine applications. Many works were published on the development of diagnosis tools for the engines using data from simulation models or from experiments on a sophisticated engine test bench. However, the simulation data varies a lot with actual operational data, and the available sensor data on the actual vessel is much less compared to the data from test benches. Therefore, it is necessary to develop anomaly prediction and fault diagnosis models from limited data available from the engines. In this paper, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based anomaly detection model and machine learning (ML)-based fault diagnosis model were developed using the actual data acquired from a diesel engine of a cargo vessel. Unlike the previous works, the study uses operational, thermodynamic, and vibration data for the anomaly detection and fault diagnosis. The paper provides the overall architecture of the proposed predictive maintenance system including details on the sensorization of assets, data acquisition, edge computation, and AI model for anomaly prediction and ML algorithm for fault diagnosis. Faults with varying severity levels were induced in the subcomponents of the engine to validate the accuracy of the anomaly detection and fault diagnosis models. The unsupervised stacked autoencoder AI model predicts the engine anomalies with 87.6% accuracy. The balanced accuracy of supervised fault diagnosis model using Support Vector Machine algorithm is 99.7%. The proposed models are vital in marching towards sustainable shipping and have potential to deploy across various applications.