Speed Transform, a New Time-Varying Frequency Analysis Technique

Due to the periodical motions of most machinery in steady state operation, many diagnosis techniques are based on frequency analysis. This is often performed through Fourier transform. Some extensions of these techniques to the more general case of non stationary operation have been proposed. They are based on signal processing advances such as time-frequency representations and adaptive filtering. The technique proposed in this paper is based on the observation that, when under non stationary operation, the vibrations of a machine are still tightly related to the speed variations. It is thus suggested to decompose the vibration signal over a set of time-varying frequency sine waves synchronized with the speed variations, instead of fixed frequency sine waves. This set of time-varying frequency sine waves is shown to be an orthonormal basis of the subspace it spans in the case of linear frequency variations. An insight to the improvement such decomposition can provide for spectral analysis, cyclostationary analysis and time-frequency representation is given. Some application examples are presented over both simulated signals and real-life signals.