A new real-time signal processing approach for frequency-varying machinery

Abstract

Development of condition monitoring approaches has played a key role in the stability and safety of frequency-varying machinery operations. Conventional time–frequency analysis methods suffer problems such as analysis results being too complex to realize highly intelligent and automated condition monitoring systems. Blind source separation is an attractive tool due to its excellent performance in separating defect source signals from their mixtures without detailed knowledge of sources and mixing processes; however, it can only be applied under some strict conditions. In this paper, a nonuniform sampling model is built and a new processing algorithm of frequency-varying signal is proposed. The relationship between the power spectral density (PSD) of the vibration signal of frequency-varying machinery and frequencies at different rotational speeds is derived. The proposed method can adaptively eliminate the influence of the varying rotational speed in the revised PSD. Some classical signal analysis methods are implemented to compare with the proposed approach by simulations. An experiment has been conducted by using a JD-1 wheel/rail simulation facility to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.