Synchro-Transient-Extracting Transform for the Analysis of Signals with Both Harmonic and Impulsive Components

Abstract: Time-frequency analysis (TFA) techniques play an important role in the field of machine fault diagnosis attributing to their superiority in dealing with nonstationary signals. Synchroextracting transform (SET) and transient-extracting transform (TET) are two newly emerging techniques that can produce energy concentrated representation for nonstationary signals. However, SET and TET are only suitable for processing harmonic signals and impulsive signals, respectively. This poses a challenge for each of these two techniques when a signal contains both harmonic and impulsive components. In this paper, we propose a new TFA technique to solve this problem. The technique first divides time-frequency (TF) coefficients into two types according to the chirp rate of the signal, and then TF ridges are respectively extracted to prevent the limitation for the independent use of SET and TET. This allows the technique to generate an energy-concentrated TF representation for both harmonics and impulses in the signal. Furthermore, we theoretically demonstrate that the proposed technique retains the signal reconstruction capability. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is verified using numerical and real-world signals.