AN ENHANCED TIME SYNCHRONOUS AVERAGING FOR ROTATING EQUPIMENT ANALYSIS Eric Bechhoefer NRG Systems 110 Riggs Road,

Hingesburg, VT 05461 Telephone: (802) 482-2255 erb@nrgsystems.com

Abstract: The Time Synchronous Average (TSA) facilitates improved analysis of shaft and gear components on rotating equipment. The TSA, by resampling vibration data synchronously with shaft rotational position, removes the effect of shaft speed variation. Current TSA algorithms use linear or spline interpolation in resampling the vibration data relative to shaft position. This assumes that the derivative of the shaft speed does not change sign (linear) or only changes sign once (spline). This assumption fails to control a 3/revolution change in shaft speed of a wind turbine main shaft (due to tower shadow). Additionally, low rates of the main shaft resulted in excessively long TSA lengths that greatly impact the processing speed and numerical accuracies. This paper presents an enhanced TSA that controls for intra-revolution changes in shaft speed and allows for in-line filtering and decimation of vibration data to reduced the length of the TSA. Key words: Condition Monitoring; Rotating Equipment; Time Synchronous Average; Shaft Analysis; Gear Analysis; Resampling Introduction: During the verification and validation of a condition monitoring system for wind turbines, a number of unexpected issues were found that degraded the expected performance of the Time Synchronous Average (TSA). The TSA is used for shaft and gear analysis to both control variation in shaft speed and to reduce non-synchronous noise (system white noise, bearing noise) [1]. A number of TSA techniques have been developed. In [2], a non-radix 2 FFT based was presented, which amounts to a linear interpolation method. In [3], it was recommended that cubic interpolation is superior to linear interpolation. That said, experimental results from [4] showed no statically difference between linear, cubic or spline interpolation methods. These performance results were observed in [5], where non-radix 2 based TSA, linear interpolation, cubic spline interpolation and comb filter interpolation where compared against a know fault, with no statistical significance between the TSA methodologies. The afore mentioned TSA techniques have a model assumption that the rate of change in the shaft under analysis changes sign at most twice. That is, over one revolutions of the shaft, the shaft can: Speed up at an approximately linear rate, or The shaft can slow down at an approximately linear rate, or 1

The shaft can speed up then slow down (here the cubic/polynomial or Spline interpolation would be superior to linear interpolation).

However, the environment of a wind turbine is unusual, in that for the main shaft, the sign of the rate of change of the shaft change 6 times in one revolution (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Change in Shaft Rate over 1 Revolution Besides the large change in speed over the 40-second acquisition, over 1 revolution of the main shaft, there is a 3/revolution change in speed. This phenomenology has been observed in [6] by wind turbine controls and power conversion engineers. These 3/rev oscillations are important from their perspective since they could have wide-ranging effects on control systems and power quality. In systems connected directly to the grid, these torque oscillations could affect of grid power quality (flicker). For systems interfaced to the grid through converters, these torque oscillations would be more important in terms of converter control. This torque ripple is the result of tower shadow and wind shear. Tower shadow occurs because the wind flow directly in front of the tower is stalled. As the blade passes in front of the tower at the bottom of the arc, it generates less lift, which reduces the torque on the hub. Wind shear occurs because air is a viscous fluid: wind speed increases with height. As the blade reaches the top of the rotor arch, the wind speed is greater and the blade generates more lift, which increases the torque on the hub. From a condition monitoring perspective, there has been no reporting of this shaft behavior. This model violation (e.g. multiple changes in sign of the derivative of the shaft speed) will adversely effect shaft and gear analysis. One of the goals of this paper is to quantify the degradation in performance as a result of this model violation. The TSA Model: The model for vibration in a shaft in a gear box was given in [1] as: 2

x(t) = i=1:K Xi(1+ ai(t))cos(2i fm(t)+ i)+b(t) where: Xi is the amplitude of the kth mesh harmonic fm(t) is the average mesh frequency ak(t) is the amplitude modulation function of the kth mesh harmonic. i(t) is the phase modulation function of the kth mesh harmonic. i is the initial phase of harmonic k, and b(t) is additive background noise. The mesh frequency is a function of the shaft rotational speed: fm = Nf, where N is the number of teeth on the gear and f is the shaft speed. In general, vibration models assume that f is constant. However, because of the finite bandwidth of the feedback control, there is some wander in the shaft speed due to changes in load or feedback delay. This change in speed will result in smearing of amplitude energy in the frequency domain. The smearing effect, and non synchronous noise, is reduced by resampling the time domain signal into the angular domain: mx() = E[x()] = mx(+). The variable is the period of the cycle to which the gearbox operation is periodic, and E[] is the expectation (e.g. ensemble mean). This makes the assumption that mx() is stationary and ergodic. This results in non-synchronous noise is reduce by 1/sqrt(rev), where rev is the number of cycles measured for the TSA. The FFT (non-radix 2) based TSA algorithm is not considered in this analysis, primarily because implementation of arbitrary length FFTs is sufficiently difficult as to limit its application in embedded/on-line analysis systems. As such, this analysis is based on radix-2 length TSA, where the TSA is an example of angular resampling [1], [2], where the number of data points in one shaft revolution (rn) are interpolated into m number of data points, such that: For all shaft revolutions n, m is larger than r, And m = 2ceiling (log2 (r)) (again assuming Radix 2 Fast Fourier Transform).

In order to capture the 3/revolution change in speed, one can borrow from sampling theory. In this case, the TSA for 1/revolution is sampled such that the change is shaft RPM can be reconstructed. From Nyquist, to reconstruct the 3/rev, at least 6 samples (e.g. the TSA is resampled at intervals of /3) are needed. Because of the uses of a radix-2 FFT, the TSA always is a power of 2. To divide evenly, the sub-sections will be a power of 2: 8 (/4) or 16 (/8) intervals in one revolution. For example, in an 8192 length FFT, each revolution is sub-sampled 16, which the length of each sub-sample being 512 data points. Both 8 and 16 inter revolution sections methods were tested, the 16 inter revolution section version had marginally improved performance. Figure 2 is the detrended main shaft speed, averaged over 9 revolutions. It compares a TSA (e.g. linear interpolation) with the enhanced/sub sampled TSA, which captures the 3/revolution change in shaft speed. 3

Figure 2 3/Rev Change in Shaft RPM, TSA, and Enhanced TSA Note that the by sub-sampling the dRPM by 16, each linearly interpolated section captures the slope of the shaft RPM well. Quantified Performance of the Enhanced TSA: Ultimately, the need to use to a more complex TSA must be justified by an increase in analysis performance. The performance of the enhanced TSA was quantified by using a data set from a wind turbine planetary gearbox. In this example, the ring gear has 123 teeth: the Fourier transform of the TSA should have gear mesh in bin 124, and its higher harmonics (123 x n + 1). Qualitatively, one can view the difference in the time domain as a phase difference in the TSA and the enhanced TSA (Figure 3). In the frequency domain, this phase error would be expected to cause smearing of the frequency content. The phenomena will be greater at higher frequencies or harmonics of a signal. For example, given the 123-tooth ring gear, the enhanced TSA should have more energy in the FFT bin 124 than the TSA or a simple spectrum, and less energy in its side bands. In Figure 4, the main rotor shaft average RPM is 13.3, or .22 Hz (1/rev). The ring gear (123/rev) has a frequency of 27.05 Hz. The 2nd harmonic is 54 Hz, and the 3rd harmonic is 81 Hz. The planetary carrier has 3 planets, which results in side bands +/2/rev around the ring mesh frequency (0.44 Hz). Clearly visible in Figure 4 is that the enhanced TSA has less smearing of spectral content, especially at the 2nd and 3rd harmonic. In fact, the TSA has lost most of its spectral energy at the 3rd harmonic, while the enhanced TSA clearly show the 3rd harmonic of the ring gear, and the planet gear upper sideband. 4

Figure 3 Comparison of the TSA with Enhanced TSA in the Time Domain. Note the phase error is largest at 0.5 of the revolution.

Figure 4 Enhanced TSA is shown to have less smearing of Spectral Energy The performance of the enhanced TSA can now be quantified by measuring the signal to noise ratio of the 1st through 5th harmonic of the gear mesh frequency, or by the measure of the sideband energy ratio (which should be small). This was done for: 5

The simple spectrum using Welchs method (not normalized for changes in main rotor speed), The Fourier transform of the TSA, The Fourier transform of the enhanced TSA using linear interpolation, and The Fourier transform of the enhanced TSA using cubic interpolation.

The comparison of the linear and cubic/polynomial interpolation was tested to see if in this example, cubic interpolation would be superior to linear interpolation. The results are seen in Table 1. Table 1 SNR of the Ring Gear Frequency for the Simple Spectrum, the TSA and the Enhanced TSA Spectrum (Linear and Cubic Interpolation) Case/Hz Spectrum TSA ETSA Lin. ETSA Cub. 27.05 (Hz) 17.00 dB 42.17 dB 42.96 dB 43.02 dB 54.12 (Hz) 5.15 dB 21.72 dB 26.63 dB 26.73 dB 81.17 (Hz) 2.94 dB 13.03 dB 13.43 dB 13.69 dB 108.23 (Hz) 0.99 dB 10.15 dB 11.62 dB 11.89 dB 135.29 (Hz) 2.12 dB 2.39 dB 10.69 dB 11.36 dB

Clearly, all TSA methods have higher SNR than the plain spectrum (indicating that the spectrum alone is a poor analysis tool). At higher frequencies, the enhanced TSA (which resamples 16 times over one revolution) methods are superior to the TSA. There is some nominal improvement of the cubic/polynomial interpolation method over the enhanced, linear interpolation TSA method. In addition to measuring the SNR, the sideband energy ratio for the first 5 harmonics was measured. For this nominal gear, where the carrier has a low rate (which ensures a low 1/rev acceleration), the side bands should be small. Any phase error or change in main shaft rate that is not modeled will result in spectral smearing, resulting in increased energy in the side bands. As seen in Table 2, the enhanced TSA methods are superior to the simple spectrum or the regular TSA. Note that there is no significant difference between the enhance TSA linear and cubic interpolation methods. Table 2 Sideband Energy Ratios for the Ring Gear, for the Simple Spectrum, the TSA, and the Enhanced TSA (Linear and Cubic Interpolation) Case/Hz Spectrum TSA ETSA Lin. ETSA Cub. 27.05 (Hz) 0.765 0.28 0.07 0.07 54.12 (Hz) 0.98 0.34 0.34 0.34 81.17 (Hz) 1.51 0.63 0.51 0.50 108.23 (Hz) 1.01 0.92 0.31 0.31 135.29 (Hz) 1.42 0.36 0.31 0.30

The on-line condition monitoring system was implemented with the enhanced linear interpolation method. The performance difference was small or negligible between the linear and cubic interpolation. However, for an embedded system, computation complexity/Big O order of operations was 3x for the cubic/polynomial interpolation over the linear interpolation, or large enough to make a difference in processing speed. 6

Inline Decimation in the TSA: There are two contending system-engineering issues when selecting the accelerometer sample rate. For bearing analysis, one needs to sample at a high enough sample rate to capture the structural resonance of the bearing. This is needed for bearing envelope analysis. For the TSA, one needs to sample at a low enough rate such that the length of the TSA is less than the maximum allowable FFT length (chosen to be 8196 data points). The reason for this is two fold. First, the condition monitoring system that this was designed for is embedded: the microcontroller supports floating point math natively, but not double precision. It was observed that when performing analysis with single precision at 32768 lengths or longer, there were significant numerical issues in the Hilbert transform based analysis (gear amplitude modulation and gear frequency modulation analysis [7]). Second, just from a generalized analysis perspective, other than process noise, there are no true synchronous artifacts in these longer TSA. For example, the 12000/rev of a 32768 length TSA is, effectively, meaningless. Hence, one should not be doing analysis at these lengths). For high-speed shaft, TSA length is not an issue. However, TSA length becomes a problem for larger wind turbines (2MW and greater) where the main shaft rate is a faction of a Hertz. For example, consider main shaft with turning at 11 RPM (0.18 Hertz). For the main and carrier bearing, one would like capture the 2 KHz to 2.2 KHz window for bearing analysis. This requires sampling at greater than 4.4 KHz. The closest sample rate for the CMS was 6104 sps. For this shaft rate, the length of the TSA is:
65536 = 2!"#$
!"#! !"#$/.!"

This is longer than the maximum allowable FFT. The next lower sample rate is 3052, but this is too low for the bearing analysis. One solution to this problem is to copy and maintain two sets of data, where the copy is low pass filter and decimated. Because there is limited resources on the sensor (RAM, processing power), an inline low pass filter and decimate capability was added to the TSA, where only the data points that are used for interpolation are filtered (e.g. filtering was only done on the data used that would remain after decimation). This allowed the sensor to not need increased RAM. The pseudo code of the enhanced TAS algorithm is: If the length of the TSA, n > 8196, then o Decimate = n/8196, o Filter coefficients are derived for a 4 point, FIR filter design, where the normalized frequency is 1/Decimate. o For Decimation by 8, (normalized window of 0.125), b = [0.0328 0.2396 0.4553 0.2396 0.0328] The flow of the enhanced TSA algorithm is: for 1 to # of TSA Revolution for 1 to 16 (the number of sub sections to capture 3/rev interpolate the vector of zero cross times 7

get the change in time between the re-sampled data, dt. for the length of each sub section if decimate = 1 (no decimation) interpolate the data point at index, index + 1, for time dt. else Interpolate the data point by filtering the data point at index 2,1,0,1,2 using b the data point at index -1,0,1,2,3 using b In-Line Decimation Performance Metrics: A concern of this low pass filtering and decimation is that fault artifacts could be lost. Figure 5 compares the original length TSA with a decimated TSA. In the time domain, the decimated TSA has much less content, which is explained by the much-reduced bandwidth of the decimated TSA. To quantify the effect of decimation, similar metrics as per the 3/revolution TSA analysis were affected: the SNR and sideband energy ratio between a nominal length TSA and a decimated TSA was compared for the ring gear (Table 3, and Table 4). Table 3 SNR of the Ring Gear Frequency for the TSA and Decimated TSA Case/Hz 30.84 Hz 61.67 Hz 92.51 Hz 123.35 Hz 154.18 Hz 32768 TSA 11.88 dB 13.50 dB 5.76 dB 9.20 dB 12.26 dB 8192 TSA 13.00 dB 14.63 dB 5.10 dB 8.60 dB 12.48 dB Table 4 Sideband Energy Ratio of the Ring Gear for the TSA and Decimated TSA Case/Hz 30.84 Hz 61.67 Hz 92.51 Hz 123.35 Hz 154.18 Hz 32768 TSA 0.33 0.31 0.68 0.79 0.15 8192 TSA 0.37 0.37 0.53 0.81 0.15 Note that the decimated TSA SNR of the first 2 harmonics is higher than the nominal TSA, while the sideband energy ratios are statistically insignificant. By low pass filtering and decimating the TSA is de-noised (e.g. higher frequency, white/nonsynchronous noise). This will not only reduce processing time, but may also improve the performance detection algorithms. For analysis based on gear mesh (Figure of Merit 0, sideband modulation energy, Narrowband Analysis, Amplitude/Frequency Modulation Analysis), there is no difference in fault detection performance. These afore mentioned analysis are based in the Fourier domain, at relatively low frequency (e.g. bin 124 for a 123 tooth ring gear) which is far below the cutoff bandwidth of the decimated TSA. Where the performance may be improved is for residual or energy operator analysis. In these cases the residual or energy operator RMS will be lower, while kurtosis for a fault may be higher. This is an active subject of investigation.

Figure 5 Time and Fourier Domain of the TSAs Discussion: Because of the unique analysis requirements of wind turbines (3/revolution changes in main shaft speed, and very low shaft rates), improvements to the TSA were needed. The first enhancement was to sub-samples the TSA over one revolution, allowing a better reconstruction of the frequency content in the TSA (e.g. better measure of synchronous signals). To capture the 3/revolution change in main rotor speed, the TSA was sub-sample 16 times. At some higher frequencies, the enhanced TSA had an SNR 1 to 3 dB higher than standard TSA. Both linear and linear and cubic interpolation methods were tested. The enhanced TSA using cubic interpolation had marginally higher SNR. The second enhancement was an in-line decimation capability to reduce the TSA length. Because of the very low observed shaft rates (0.11 to 0.25 Hz), and the need for higher sample rates to collect bearing data, the TSA for the main shaft were long (up to 65,536 data points for use with a radix-2 FFT). An inline decimation technique was developed to lower the apparent sample rate, such that the TSA length can be significantly reduced. The decimated TSA had higher SNR than the standard TSA, which may be a result of the reduced white noise from the in-line low pass filtering. It is hypothesized that the in-line decimated TSA for non-gear specific analysis (such as Residual or Energy Operator analysis) will have improved fault detection capability. For the embedded condition monitoring system that this TSA was developed for, 17 Fourier analysis are conduced on the TSA [7]. For a reduction in the TSA length from 32768 to 8196 (e.g. 4:1 reduction in TSA length), the processing time was reduced by a factor if 78 times. 9

While these techniques were developed to address specific performance issues in wind turbine analysis, the techniques can be employed on any gearbox to improve performance. References: [1] McFadden, P., (1987). A revised model for the extraction of periodic waveforms by time domain averaging, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 1 (1), pages 8395. [2] Vachtsevanos, G., et al. (2006). Intelligent Fault Diagnosis and Prognosis for Engineering Systems, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006, page 418-419. [3] Randall, R., (2011). Vibration-based Condition Monitoring: Industrial, Aerospace & Automotive Application, John Wiley, New York [4] Decker, H., Zakrajsek, J., (1999). Comparison of Interpolation Methods as Applied to Time Synchronous Averaging ARL-TR-1960, MFPT, April 19-22 [5] Bechhoefer, E., Kingsley, M. (2009). A Review of Time Synchronous Average Algorithms. Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society [6] Dolan, D., Lehn, R., (2006). Simulation Model of Wind Turbine 3p Torque Oscillation due to Wind Shear and Tower Shadow, IEEE Transaction on Energy Conversion, VOL. 21, NO. 3. [7] McFadden, P., Smith, J., (1985), A Signal Processing Technique for detecting local defects in a gear from a signal average of the vibration. Proc Instn Mech Engrs, 199 [8] Bechhoefer, E., Fang, A., (2011), Algorithms for Embedded PHM, IEEE PHM Conference, Denver. Bibliography: Eric Bechhoefer received his B.S. in Biology from the University of Michigan, his M.S. in Operations Research from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a Ph.D. in General Engineering from Kennedy Western University. His is a former Naval Aviator who has worked extensively on condition based maintenance, rotor track and balance, vibration analysis of rotating machinery and fault detection in electronic systems. Dr. Bechhoefer is a board member of the Prognostics Health Management Society, and a member of the IEEE Reliability Society.

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