Aiming at the problems of extracting the fault features of reciprocating compressors under the strong noise interference environment and the over-reliance on the a priori knowledge in the parameter setting of the VMD algorithm, a reciprocating compressor fault diagnosis method that integrates the VMD algorithm of trend evaluation and MSSE2D is proposed. In this paper, the valve fault data of reciprocating compressor is selected as the research object, firstly, the signal is analyzed and processed in depth by applying the VMD technique optimized by spectral trend evaluation, then the MSSE2D is used for analysis and calculation, and finally the support vector machine is used for validation test, and the experimental results show that this method can extract the fault characteristics of the reciprocating compressor valve efficiently compared with other methods, and it can quickly and accurately diagnose the various states of the valve, the results show that this method can effectively extract the fault characteristics of reciprocating compressor valves compared with other methods, and can quickly and accurately diagnose and distinguish between various states of valves.