A Bilateral Second-Order Synchrosqueezing Transform and Application to Vibration Monitoring of Aerospace Engine

Abstract

The synchrosqueezing transform (SST) and its ameliorated methods can enhance the energy concentration of the vibration signals in time-frequency domain, but it does not show enough effect for the weak feature extraction. Besides, many large-scale rotating machines such as aerospace engines and gas engines often work under complex vibrations, and this increases the difficulty for health monitoring based on vibration signals. This article presents a time-frequency analysis (TFA) named bilateral second-order SST (BFSST2). It can sharpen the instantaneous frequencies (IFs) like second-order SST (FSST2), and more importantly, it can extract the weak features such as amplitude-modulation frequency-modulation IFs and small-amplitude time-varying IFs which are easily ignored on time-frequency plane. To achieve the aforementioned target, the IFs are first obtained by employing FSST2, and then a bilateral function representing a novel negative-positive TFA is structured by combining the hyperbolic tangent function, exponential function, and sign function together. After that the large-amplitude IFs are transformed into small-negative amplitude ones by the product with the bilateral function, and this can not only enhance the original weak feature but also avoid its confusion with the transformed small-negative amplitude ones. The proposed BFSST2 is validated by a numerical simulation. At last, two case studies are given to illustrate its effectiveness in aerospace engine vibration monitoring.