Papers by Author: Jinhoi Gu

Abstract: In an automotive engine, faults induce impulsive vibrations and thereby degrade engine performance, making it important for an automotive engineer to detect and analyze impulsive vibration signals for fault diagnosis. However, detecting and identifying impulsive signals is often difficult because of interfering signals such as those due to engine firing, harmonics of crankshaft speed and broadband noise components. These interferences hinder early fault detection. To overcome this difficulty we present a two-stage ALEF (Adaptive Line Enhancer Filter) that is capable of enhancing impulsive signals embedded in background noise. This method is used to pre-process signals prior to time-frequency analysis via higher order methods such as the combined higher order time-frequency.

Abstract: This paper presents experimental results of source identification for a non-minimum phase system. Generally, a causal linear system may be described by matrix form. The inverse problem is considered as a matrix inversion. Direct inverse method cannot be applied for a non-minimum phase system, because the system has ill-conditioning. Therefore, in this study the SVD inverse technique is introduced to execute an effective inversion. In a non-minimum phase system, its system matrix may be singular or near-singular and has very small singular values. These very small singular values have information about a phase of the system and ill-conditioning. Using this property we could solve the ill-conditioned problem of the system and then verify it for the practical system (cantilever beam). The experimental results show that the SVD inverse technique works well for a non-minimum phase system. This inverse technique can be applied to the estimation of the magnitude of impact force, which becomes often a cause of damage to a mechanical system.

Abstract: In mechanical structures, the impact force is related to the structural damage. To identify the location where impact force occurs, the triangle method has long been used. This method requires three acceleration signals or strain signals to be measured on the mechanical structure. Time delay among these signals is useful information to estimate the location of the impact force. It is very difficult to estimate time delay by using the raw data of three signals because the propagation wave of the structure is a dispersive wave. Therefore, three signals should be analyzed in the time and frequency domain in order to estimate the time delay at each frequency. For the time-frequency analysis of highly non-stationary signals like impulse signals, time-frequency methods or time scale methods have been used. These methods use the first or second order statistical characteristics of the signal. This paper outlines the higher order Wigner method to obtain time and frequency information of a signal. Since it uses the high order statistics of signals, this method is useful for identifying the impact signal embedded in the background. It has a better time-frequency resolution for a non-linear signal than other time-frequency and time scale methods. This method can be applied to estimate the location of an impact force, which becomes a cause of damage of mechanical plants. Finally, in order to prove this method, experimental work was conducted on an aluminum plate in the laboratory.