Acoustical signals of mechanical systems can provide original information of operating conditions, and thus benefit for machinery condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. However, acoustical signals measured by sensors are mixed signals of all the sources, and normally it is impossible to be directly used for acoustical source identification or feature extraction. Therefore, this paper presents nonlinear factor analysis (NLFA) and applies it to acoustical source separation and identification of mechanical systems. The effects by numbers of hidden neurons and mixed signals on separation performances of NLFA are comparatively studied. Furthermore, acoustical signals from a test bed with shell structures are separated and identified by NLFA and correlation analysis, and the effectiveness of NLFA on acoustical signals is validated by both numerical case studies and an experimental case study. This work can benefit for machinery noise monitoring, reduction and control, and also provide pure source information for machinery condition monitoring or fault diagnosis
