A tacholess order tracking methodology based on a probabilistic approach to incorporate angular acceleration information into the maxima tracking process

Rotational speed or phase measurements are important in the rotating machine condition monitoring field. Rotating machines often operate in the presence of fluctuating rotational speeds and its components generate signals which are periodical in the angle domain. Hence, it is essential to perform order tracking when condition monitoring is performed under varying speed conditions. Computed order tracking is performed with a measured tachometer signal and it requires additional hardware to be installed on the machine, which may not be feasible nor practical. This article presents a tacholess order tracking method which is capable of accurately estimating the phase of a shaft of interest in the presence of large angular accelerations and noise. An improved maxima tracking procedure is used with an angular-displacement Vold-Kalman filter and the Hilbert transform to estimate the instantaneous phase of the shaft under consideration. The estimated instantaneous phase is used to resample the vibration signal from the time to the angle domain. The proposed tacholess order tracking technique is critically investigated on three numerical and three experimental rotational speed profiles. The minimum and maximum phase error obtained for the experimental data was 0.037697 and 0.05022 radians respectively, which highlights the potential of the technique. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.