In order to detect a mechanical type of structural failure of the circuit breaker, the characteristics of the circuit breaker mechanical vibration signal is analyzed in this paper. A combination of medium voltage circuit breaker based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) amount of energy and support vector machine (SVM) theory vibration signal feature vector extraction and analysis of fault classification method is proposed. First, the vibration signal of the circuit breaker is decomposed by EMD, then intrinsic mode function (IMF) is obtain. The major fault feature information intrinsic mode functions the amount of energy of the component is obtained by discrete sampling points and the amount of energy. Using the amount of energy of IMF component as a feature vector, the failure of the test sample signal as input feature vector into trained "BT-SVM" support vector machine classification mechanism for fault classification. The differences and fault type of vibration signals can be identified by this method through the experimental analysis.