Measurement of Angular Vibrations in Rotating Shafts: Effects of the Measurement Setup Nonidealities

In this paper, the authors discuss a measurement method, based on the zero-crossing demodulation technique of FM signals, to estimate the angular velocity vibrations of a rotating shaft. The demodulation algorithm is applied without any filtering to the direct voltage output issued by some probes sensing the passages of arbitrarily shaped targets installed on the rotating shaft. The authors discuss a theoretical approach to analyze the measurement problem taking into account the chief nonidealities related to the measurement setup, i.e., they have investigated the effects of both the shaft side vibrations and the irregular shape of the targets. On the basis of the theoretical results, the authors propose a measurement method that can reject the effects of these mentioned nonidealities, exploiting the measurements of two or more probes properly positioned around the shaft.