Do Missing Tachometer Pulses Mean The End Of The Road For Your Test?

Creating a good quality tachometer signal is one of the hardest parts of analyzing rotating machinery. So what happens if we have missing tachometer pulses? The data looked great until we tried to perform some in-depth torsional vibration analysis. And now we no longer have the component or vehicle to retest it.  Do we have to scrap the whole test? Was all that time wasted? Not necessarily…

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Torsional Vibration, Tacho Pulses And Aliasing

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.

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Analyzing Shaft Twist And Repairing Damaged Tachos

This post discusses analyzing shaft twist and at the same time handling the less than perfect data that we have all come across.

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.

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