It is well known that the human auditory system possesses remarkable capabilities to analyze and identify signals. Therefore, it would be significant to build an auditory model based on the mechanism of human auditory systems, which may improve the effects of mechanical signal analysis and enrich the methods of mechanical faults features extraction. However the existing methods are all based on explicit senses of mathematics or physics, and have some shortages on distinguishing different faults, stability, and suppressing the disturbance noise, etc. For the purpose of improving the performances of the work of feature extraction, an auditory model, early auditory(EA) model, is introduced for the first time. This auditory model transforms time domain signal into auditory spectrum via bandpass filtering, nonlinear compressing, and lateral inhibiting by simulating the principle of the human auditory system. The EA model is developed with the Gammatone filterbank as the basilar membrane. According to the characteristics of vibration signals, a method is proposed for determining the parameter of inner hair cells model of EA model. The performance of EA model is evaluated through experiments on four rotor faults, including misalignment, rotor-to-stator rubbing, oil film whirl, and pedestal looseness. The results show that the auditory spectrum, output of EA model, can effectively distinguish different faults with satisfactory stability and has the ability to suppress the disturbance noise. Then, it is feasible to apply auditory model, as a new method, to the feature extraction for mechanical faults diagnosis with effect.
