Time-frequency analysis of transient dispersive waves: A comparative study

The goal in this work is to investigate the effectiveness of time-frequency representations for analysing dispersive waves by comparing the performance of three different methods. In particular, the smoothed pseudo-Wigner distribution, the continuous wavelet transform and the Hilbert-Huang transform are compared and evaluated in terms of their ability to analyse dispersive elastic waves. The waves under consideration are transient flexural ones generated by an impact in a beam. In view of the results of the comparative study, the advantages and shortcomings of each method are presented and discussed. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.