Order tracking has been widely used to diagnose failures of variable speed rotating machines. The performance of the TOT (Time-Frequency Domain Tacholess Order Tracking) methods is based on the correct separation of the target component strictly related to the shaft rotation frequency. Currently, most of the methods have focused on obtaining the instantaneous frequency with accuracy. In this paper, a new TOT method has been proposed that combines the inverse short-time Fourier transform (ISTFT) with singular value decomposition (SVD). The target component closely related to the shaft rotation frequency is selected and filtered approximately in the time-frequency domain. Hence, the ISTFT is adopted to reverse the target component into the time domain. Next, SVD is used to refine the roughly filtered target component. Finally, the phase of the refined signal is extracted to resample the original signal. The performance of the method was tested using real vibration signals collected from a large-scale test rig of a high-speed train traction system.
Keywords: bearing fault diagnosis; inverse short-time Fourier transform; phase extraction; singular value decomposition; tacholess order tracking.