Online Doppler Effect Elimination Based on Unequal Time Interval Sampling for Wayside Acoustic Bearing Fault Detecting System

The railway occupies a fairly important position in transportation due to its high speed and strong transportation capability. As a consequence, it is a key issue to guarantee continuous running and transportation safety of trains. Meanwhile, time consumption of the diagnosis procedure is of extreme importance for the detecting system. However, most of the current adopted techniques in the wayside acoustic defective bearing detector system (ADBD) are offline strategies, which means that the signal is analyzed after the sampling process. This would result in unavoidable time latency. Besides, the acquired acoustic signal would be corrupted by the Doppler effect because of high relative speed between the train and the data acquisition system (DAS). Thus, it is difficult to effectively diagnose the bearing defects immediately. In this paper, a new strategy called online Doppler effect elimination (ODEE) is proposed to remove the Doppler distortion online by the introduced unequal interval sampling scheme. The steps of proposed strategy are as follows: The essential parameters are acquired in advance. Then, the introduced unequal time interval sampling strategy is used to restore the Doppler distortion signal, and the amplitude of the signal is demodulated as well. Thus, the restored Doppler-free signal is obtained online. The proposed ODEE method has been employed in simulation analysis. Ultimately, the ODEE method is implemented in the embedded system for fault diagnosis of the train bearing. The results are in good accordance with the bearing defects, which verifies the good performance of the proposed strategy.