Blind source separation: a new pre-processing tool for rotating machines monitoring?

Blind source separation (BSS) is a general signal processing method, which consists of recovering from a finite set of observations recorded by sensors, the contributions of different physical sources independently of the propagation medium and without any a priori knowledge of the sources. Recently, these methods paved a new way for the monitoring or the diagnosis of mechanical systems in a working environment. Actually, we show that BSS allows recovering the vibratory information issued from a single rotating machine working in a noisy environment by freeing the sensor signal from the contribution of other working machines. In that way, BSS can be used as a pre-processing step for rotating machine fault detection and diagnosis.