Periodic uncertainty in periodic spectral analysis of processes associated with periodic phenomena

This work addresses the problem of trying to take advantage of the nominally periodic nature of a diesel engine running at constant speed to obtain a time-varying spectral description of vibration data over the shaft period. It requires addressing a number of issues, most notably period estimation and removal of tonal components whose presence in a time-varying spectrum is redundant and undesirable. Use of a recently designed method to identify sinusoids, in conjunction with an adaptive tracking algorithm, results in significant improvement in simulations, and reasonably good improvement in the case of the diesel vibration data, especially when considering the complexity of the stochastic structure of this data