Adaptive Iterative Approach for Efficient Signal Processing of Blade Tip Timing

Blade health monitoring (BHM) is an important technology to ensure safe operation of turbine machinery. The blade tip timing (BTT) method is a non-contact approach of vibration monitoring that is widely used for aero-engines. A BTT signal can be characterized as nonuniform and sub-Nyquist sampled (i.e., under-sampled). For nonuniform sampling, the least squares (LS) fitting method has long been used to reconstruct the spectrum. However, the under-sampling of the BTT signal causes the spectrum obtained by LS fitting aliasing. The iterative reweighted LS periodogram (IRLSP) can eliminate the aliasing caused by sub-Nyquist and nonuniform sampling. This method weakens the frequency aliasing through the method of reweighted iteration, but the consequence of this operation is that the amount of calculation is greatly increased. Thus, we propose an adaptive iterative approach (AIA) based on the IRLSP that combines a priori information of the blade. The main contribution of this method is to improve the computational efficiency for processing the BTT signal and the effect of anti-aliasing. These two points mean that this method is expected to become a real-time blade vibration monitoring method. We combined a finite element model with modal testing to perform simulations and verify the improvement with AIA. A large number of experiments were also performed to verify the effectiveness of our approach for BHM.