The application of time-frequency methods of acoustic signal processing in the diagnostics of tram drive components

The paper presents the course of investigations and the analysis of the possibility of applying selected methods of time-frequency processing of non-stationary acoustic signals in the assessment of the technical condition of tram drive  components, as well as a new combined method proposed by the authors. An experiment was performed in the form of a pass-by test of the acoustic pressure generated by a Solaris Tramino S105p tram. A comparative analysis has been carried out for an efficient case and a case with damage to the traction gear of the third bogie in the form of broken gear teeth. The recorded signal was analyzed using short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and continuous wavelet transform (CWT). It was found that the gear failure causes an increase in the sound level generated by a given bogie for frequencies within the range of characteristic frequencies of the tested device. Due to the limitations associated with the fixed window resolution in STFT and the inability to directly translate scales to frequencies in CWT, it was found that these methods can be helpful in determining suspected damage, but are too imprecise and prone to errors when the parameters of both transforms are poorly chosen. A new CWT-Cepstrum method was proposed as a solution, using the wavelet transform as a pre-filter before cepstrum signal processing. With a sampling rate of 8192 Hz, a db6 mother wavelet, and a scale range of 1:200, the new method was found to infer the occurrence of damage in an interpretation-free manner. The results were validated on an independent pair of trams of the same model with identical damage and as a reference on a pair of undamaged trams demonstrating that the method can be successfully replicated for different vehicles.