A novel approach for 1D vibration signal de‐noising filter using partial differential equation (PDE) is presented. In particular, the numerical solution of higher‐order PDE is generated, and we show that it enables the amplitude‐frequency characteristic in filter to be estimated more accurately, which results in better de‐noising performance in comparison with the low‐order PDE. The de‐noising tests on different degree of artificial noise are conducted. Experimental tests have been rigorously compared with different de‐noising methods to verify the efficacy of the proposed high‐order PDE filter method. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.