In this paper, a novel intelligent fault diagnosis method based on empirical mode
decomposition (EMD), fuzzy feature extraction and support vector machines (SVM) is proposed. The method consists of two stages. In the first stage, intrinsic mode components are obtained with EMD from original signals and converted into fuzzy feature vectors, and then the mechanical fault can be detected. In the second stage, these extracted fuzzy feature vectors are input into the multi-classification SVM to identify the different abnormal cases. The proposed method is applied to the classification of a turbo-generator set under three different operating conditions. Testing results show that the classification accuracy of the proposed model is greatly improved compared with the multi-classification SVM without feature extraction and the multi-classification SVM with extracting the fuzzy feature from wavelet packets, and the faults of steam turbo-generator set can be correctly and rapidly diagnosed using this model.