A tacholess order tracking method based on the STFTSC algorithm for rotor unbalance fault diagnosis under variable-speed conditions

Abstract Due to the fact that rotors usually operate in a non-stationary mode with changing speeds, the conventional rotor unbalance detection method based on the stationary signal will produce a major “spectrum ambiguity issue” and affect the accuracy of rotor unbalance detection. To this end, a tacholess order tracking method based on the STFTSC algorithm is suggested in this study, where the STFTSC algorithm is developed by combining the short-time Fourier transform and the seam carving algorithm. Firstly, the STFTSC algorithm is utilized to accurately extract the instantaneous frequency (IF) of the rotor and calculate the instantaneous phase under variable-speed conditions. Subsequently, the original signal is resampled in the angular domain to transform the non-stationary time domain signal into a stable angle domain signal, eliminating the effect of the speed variations. Finally, the angular domain signal is transformed into the order domain signal, which uses the discrete Fourier transform and the discrete spectrum correction method to identify the amplitude and phase corresponding to the fundamental frequency component of the signal. The simulation results show that the IF extracted by the STFTSC algorithm has higher extraction accuracy compared with the traditional STFT spectral peak detection method and effectively eliminates the effect of speed fluctuations. A rotor dynamic-balancing experiment shows that the unbalance correction effect based on the STFTSC algorithm is remarkable, with the average unbalance amount decrease rate on the left and right sides being 90.02% and 92.56%, respectively, after a single correction.