This paper presents the application of new time frequency method, ensemble empirical modedecomposition (EEMD), in purpose to detect localized faults of damage at an early stage.EEMD is a self adaptive analysis method for non-linear and non-stationary signals and itwas recently proposed by Huang and Wu to overcome the drawbacks of the traditionalempirical mode decomposition (EMD). The vibration signal is usually noisy. To detect thefault at an early stage of its development, generally the residual signal is used. Thereexist different methods in literature to calculate the residual signal, in this paper wemention some of them and we propose a new method which is based on EEMD. The results givenby the different methods are compared by using simulated and experimental signals.