Experimental research into time–frequency characteristics of cavitation noise using wavelet scalogram

The cavitation has become the main cause of the damage to the hydraulic machine. Cavitation detection is very important to guarantee the safe running of the hydraulic machine. The sound, especially the audible sound, based methods are becoming attractive due to their simplicity and logicality in the application. However, the cavitation noise is easy to be contaminated by the background noise. In order to understand the characteristics of the cavitation noise deeply, using the wavelet scalogram analysis, this paper presents an experimental study to investigate the time–frequency characteristics of the cavitation noise of various cavitation states and the relation between the cavitation noise and the cavitation process. In addition, the method of parameters optimization for the wavelet is used to improve the transform performance of the wavelet scalogram. The results show that: the cavitation noise is composed of the components with wide band frequency and obvious impulse feature; but the cavitation noise of different cavitation stages has different time–frequency characteristics and compositions; in addition, the cavitation noise can be distinguished from the background noise because they have totally different frequency characteristic. This study validates that the cavitation noise can be used to detect the cavitation state and monitor the cavitation process.