By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
Any vibration signal may be analyzed into amplitude and phase as a function of frequency. The phase represents fifty percent of the information so it is most important to measure phase for vibration monitoring. Most vibrations on a rotating machine are related to the rotational speed so it is clearly important to have a measure of the speed, either directly or as a once per revolution tacho pulse. A question some time arises as to whether a once per revolution tacho reference signal is needed to measure phase. Is it possible to get phase if we only have a speed signal? This note gives some insight into those questions. Actually the question that should be asked is - “Can we measure a meaningful phase, for use in vibration monitoring, if we only have a speed signal as well as the vibration signals?” read »»»
By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
By combining a speed signal with a data signal and using the Short Time FFT algorithm (Hopping FFT), it is possible to extract order data directly as a function of time (Orders from Hopping FFT) rather than as a function of speed (Waterfall). This is very useful when analyzing a complete operational cycle which includes run ups, rundowns and periods at operational speeds. read »»»
By Richard O’Sullivan, Quiet! Acoustic and Vibration Consulting
The requirement was to develop a ‘standard’ test for assessing the sound quality of power steering pumps in vehicles. Measurements needed to be objective so that the method would be suitable for evaluating dissimilar vehicles and different types of pump.
Noise is an important consideration when a consumer is selecting a new vehicle. It is therefore imperative that every aspect of the vehicle’s acoustic profile is thoroughly understood and refined.
From an end user point of view the assessment criterion is simply how much will the driver or passengers hear the pump noise in relation to the vehicle background noise. That is, will the pump produce, what may be called, audible tones with the vehicle in different operating conditions. read »»»
By Mike E Moore, VP Sales & Marketing, Prosig USA, Inc.
Using Prosig’s P8000 series data acquisition system with DATS signal analysis software, torsional analysis (crank jitter) was performed on an automotive engine attached to an engine dynamometer. The significance of this is that only one tachometer channel was required to identify crank jitter. read »»»
By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
Order cuts are taken from a set of FFTs, each one at a different rpm. The rms level is then found as the Square root of the Sum of the squares of each of the FFT values. Mathematically, if Xks is the modulus (magnitude) of the kth value of the FFT at speed s for k = 1…N-1 then the rms value at that speed is given by
This takes into account the entire energy at that speed both the order and the non order components, including any noise. read »»»
By James Wren, Application Engineer, Prosig
The following note describes an application of the Prosig P8000/DATS system in the refinement of an automotive exhaust muffler design for a major after-market exhaust manufacturer in Europe. The particular vehicle under test was required by local legislation to have an overall radiated noise level of less than 70 dB. When tested, the vehicle was found to be producing 71.8 dB of radiated noise. The design of the exhaust system clearly needed to be reviewed and modified. read »»»
By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
With shafts, gears and the like, the general method of determining the rotational speed is to use some form of tachometer or shaft encoder. These give out a pulse at regular angular intervals. It we have N pulses per rev then obviously we have a pulse every (360/N) degrees. Determining the speed is nominally very simple: just measure the time between successive pulses. If this period is Tk seconds and the angle travelled is (360/ N) degrees then the rotational speed is simply estimated by 360/(N*Tk) degrees/second or 60/(N*Tk) rpm. read »»»
By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
A shaft has been instrumented with two shaft encoders, one at each end. Each shaft encoder gives out a once/rev pulse and a 720 pulses/rev signal. Each signal was digitised at 500,000 samples/second. The objective is to measure the twist in the shaft and analyze into orders. The test stand was already equipped with a data acquisition system so a Prosig acquisition system was not required. Instead it was decided that the data captured by the resident system would be imported into the DATS software. The only format available from the customer system was ‘comma separated variables’ or CSV. This is not ideal as it is an ASCII based format and therefore creates very large files. read »»»
In a recent article we described how the Prosig P8000 hardware and DATS software had been used to help Dalmeny Racing diagnose a problem with an exhaust bracket on their Formula Ford racing car. Whilst the car was instrumented for structural tests on the exhaust the opportunity was taken to also take some noise and vibration readings during an engine run up. It was felt that these would provide some useful “real world” data as well as maybe providing some extra information regarding the exhaust bracket failure. After analysing and animating the hammer data it became clear that the engine runup data wouldn’t be needed. However, it was decided that some analysis should be carried out to see if the noise and vibration data backed up the conclusions of the other tests. read »»»
By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
One would expect that averaging waterfalls and then extracting orders would give the same result as extracting orders from individual waterfalls and then averaging them. This is not the case. read »»»
By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
When working with audio signals a common requirement is to be able to equalise, cut or boost various frequency bands. A large number of hardware devices on the market provide this capability. The key aspect is that such filters are able to control bandwidth, centre frequency and gain separately. There are broadly two classes of filter used, a “shelving” filter and an “equalising “filter (also known as a “peak” filter). A shelving filter is akin to low pass and high pass filters. An equalising filter is like a bandpass or band reject filter. read »»»
By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
The measurement of the twist angle between two points along a shaft or through a gear train may be derived from a pair of tacho signals, one at each end of the shaft. Typically the tacho signals would be derived from gear teeth giving a known number of pulses/revolution. For example one end of a shaft could have a gear wheel with say 60 teeth giving 60 pulses/revolutions when measured with say an inductive or eddy current probe. read »»»
By Dr Colin Mercer, Technical Director, Prosig
The most common form of digitising data is to use a regular time based method. That is data is sampled at a constant rate specified as a number of samples/second. The Nyquist frequency, fN, is defined such that fN = SampleRate/2. As discussed elsewhere Shannons Sampling Theorem tells us that if the signal we are sampling is band limited so that all the information is at frequencies less than fN then we are alias free and have a valid digitised signal. Furthermore the theorem assures us that we have all the available information on the signal. read »»»
