Monitoring rotating machine signals

A generalized symbolic signal representation capturing the physical appearance of process monitoring signals is introduced. The signals are decomposed into simpler subcomponents described by different parametric models and combined under an object-oriented hybrid signal representation. A set of subcomponents is modeled by a piecewise spline function approximation. This model represents the signal patterns in purely mathematical terms and can be viewed as an extension of syntactic signal modeling approaches used in electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. Furthermore, a robust event-synchronous system capable of transcribing given signals into the proposed symbolic representation is described. The use of event-synchronous analysis makes the system specifically suited for process monitoring applications. A concrete example of a pump monitoring application is described