Harmonic Scrubber for Detected Modulation Frequencies

Acoustic signals have long been used to monitor the performance of machinery containing mechanical moving parts, especially machinery used in manufacturing. Rotating components generate harmonic signals with a fundamental frequency corresponding to the period of rotation, although the fundamental frequency and some of the harmonics may be missing. In addition, the meshing of the teeth in gears generates higher frequencies corresponding to the period of the gear teeth interaction. We call the former frequencies harmonic frequencies and the latter frequencies strong tone frequencies. Each strong tone frequency typically has associated with it, a set of modulation frequencies.

For each strong tone frequency, it is important to be able to determine which modulation frequencies correspond to a particular harmonic series, since this can help to determine which component in the overall mechanism is failing. In this work, we describe a novel process for selecting from a set of candidate modulation frequencies that comprise one or more harmonic sequences.

We also describe the signal processing pipeline used to extract the frequency components from the raw acoustic signal.