Identification, Decomposition and Segmentation of Impulsive Vibration Signals with Deterministic Components—A Sieving Screen Case Study

Condition monitoring is a well-established field of research; however, for industrial applications, one may find some challenges. They are mostly related to complex design, a specific process performed by the machine, time-varying load/speed conditions, and the presence of non-Gaussian noise. A procedure for vibration analysis from the sieving screen used in the raw material industry is proposed in the paper. It is more for pre-processing than the damage detection procedure. The idea presented here is related to identification and extraction of two main types of components: (i) deterministic (D)—related to the unbalanced shaft(s) and (ii) high amplitude, impulsive component randomly (R) appeared in the vibration due to pieces of ore falling down of moving along the deck. If we could identify these components, then we will be able to perform classical diagnostic procedures for local damage detection in rolling element bearing. As deterministic component may be AM/FM modulated and each impulse may appear with different amplitude and damping, there is a need for an automatic procedure. We propose a method for signal processing that covers two main steps: (a) related to R/D decomposition and including signal segmentation to neglect AM/FM modulations, iterative sine wave fitting using the least square method (for each segment), signal filtering technique by subtraction fitted sine from the raw signal, the definition of the criterion to stop iteration by residuals analysis, (b) impulse segmentation and description (beginning, end, max amplitude) that contains: detection of the number of impulses in a decomposed random part of the raw signal, detection of the max value of each impulse, statistical analysis (probability density function) of max value to find regime-switching), modeling of the envelope of each impulse for samples that protrude from the signal, extrapolation (forecasting) envelope shape for samples hidden in the signal. The procedure is explained using simulated and real data. Each step is very easy to implement and interpret thus the method may be used in practice in a commercial system.