Abstract
Introduction
Device diagnosis technology is a comprehensive science that involves many disciplines such as machinery, sensing technology, computer technology, and signal processing technology. It relies on advanced sensor technology and online detection technology to collect all kinds of dynamic data. These data are then analyzed and processed to distinguish and confirm its abnormal performance, and its development trend could be further predicted. By identifying the causes of occurrence, location, and severity, specific maintenance measures may be put forward accordingly. With the development of science and technology, the requirements of working parameters for various types of machinery, such as running speed, carrying capacity, and working life, are ever increasing. As people are gaining more in-depth understanding of the hazards, more attention is being paid to diagnostic techniques. Fault pattern recognition of rotating machinery is a hot topic in the field of fault diagnosis. Most machinery and equipment are rotating machines, among which the gas blower is the most typical. Its normal operation is closely associated with smooth production in several industries, such as metallurgy, chemistry, coal, and steel.1,2 Currently, fan-type rotating machinery is a type of equipment that is widely used in manufacturing. Some of them are the key components in production. Once these devices fail, irreparable economic losses for the enterprise will occur. Therefore, intelligent fault diagnosis technology has been widely used in its fault diagnosis. 3 Many methods could be realized for fault pattern recognition, including neural networks, vibration signal processing, cluster analysis, and so on.4–7 Unfortunately, their failure spectrums are characterized by a periodic length and a large random noise. To address this characteristic, a new spectrum estimation method is proposed in this article that improves on the conventional methods.
For the spectrum analysis, the discrete and continuous modes are both widely used in many areas; the former is the focus of this article. In signal processing, discrete spectrum analysis may achieve the transformation from the time domain to the frequency domain. This feature has been vigorously promoted in several fields including electronics, machinery, radar velocimetry, and laser Doppler. For instance, LH Benedict et al. 8 proposed an estimation approach, which was based on the turbulent velocity spectrum aiming to analyze laser Doppler data. H-H Kim et al. 9 applied the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) algorithm to arc fault detection. D Belega et al. 10 introduced parametric estimation to interference suppression.8–10 Nonetheless, these methods are held back by certain shortcomings, particularly the spectrum leakage problem, which still has not been solved properly. This is a desirable situation that would inevitably cause a greater error of frequency and phase in the calculated signal. Over the past 30 years, the development of the discrete spectrum method has yielded several algorithms, which can be roughly divided into three categories: ratio correction, energy-focus correction, and phase difference.
The theory of ratio correction (also known as interpolation) was first proposed in 1975 by JC Burgess 11 and has been successfully used in solving accurate measurement problems in the discrete higher harmonic signal parameters in the electricity field. For over 20 years, it has been repeatedly validated and widely used in engineering practice. In 1990, C Offelli and D Petri 12 proposed the energy-focus correction method, which was improved by Ding Kang and Xie Ming who developed a means for the three-point convolution amplitude correction, significantly improving the accuracy of the discrete spectrum analysis.13,14 To solve the general problem of windowing functions, Santamria and Pantaleon employed the algorithm of phase difference to complete the single-frequency signal estimation. This is an algorithm that is applicable for adding any symmetrical window function, and notably has noise immunity. 15 Despite the above features, different disadvantages of the above algorithms cannot be avoided, especially when random noise is present in the signal spectrum of mechanical failure, resulting in the low accuracy of their estimates.16–18 The noise will also seriously affect the accuracy of the spectrum estimation. The frequency estimation error is larger than that without random noise under the condition of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Therefore, a new DFT interpolation algorithm is proposed, which could be applied to gas blowers or other rotating machinery’s fault spectrum. Specific types of faults can finally be judged by the proposed method. In the new algorithm, the interpolation algorithm and zero-padding technique are used to solve the problem in which the real frequency of the signal falls between the two lines in the main lobe of the discrete spectrum to generate a larger frequency error, thus a more accurate spectrum is obtained. Moreover, for signals with random noise, the method can preprocess the input signal via the use of multiple autocorrelation operations and detect a weak useful signal submerged in the noise to improve the SNR. Even under noisy conditions, this methodology could still obtain accurate frequency. These advantages enable it to play an important role in the fields related to mechanical equipment fault diagnosis. The validity of the method is proven by means of computer simulation and numerical comparison, and then a comparative study with some traditional methods is conducted. Computer simulation results show that when working on the mechanical vibration frequency spectrum with random noise, the method presents an impressive anti-noise performance and high estimation accuracy. Its further application in other engineering fields may be highly expected. In this work, a new interpolation DFT algorithm is first proposed and then applied to obtain accurate estimates of fault signal in the scenario of random noise. The remaining sections are organized as follows. In section “Theoretical background,” a brief description of the traditional interpolation DFT algorithms is given, and then several symbols and formulas are defined for use in subsequent chapters. In section “Proposed algorithm,” the whole process of the new algorithm is deduced and extended to other classical window functions. In section “Experiment,” the proposed algorithm is applied to estimate the fault spectrum of a gas blower, followed by careful analysis on the estimation results. In section “Study of noise influence,” a comparative study of this proposed algorithm and the conventional interpolation DFT algorithms with respect to estimating the discrete spectrum is carried out. Finally, in section “Conclusion,” some of the main conclusions are summarized.
Theoretical background
To derive the algorithm theory on the discrete spectrum estimation, we assume a single-frequency cosine signal with Gaussian white noise, which is given in the form
where
becomes available. To satisfy the Nyquist sampling theorem, it is assumed that
where
The integer part
Then the signal added window undergoes an implement DFT, combined with equation (5); thus, equation (5) can further be expressed as
In equation (6),
In equation (7), the second sign on the right side denotes leakage offered by the imaginary part of the spectrum. The conditions are postulated that
Similarly, the second and the third largest spectral lines can also be determined. With proper combination of two or more spectral lines, a ratio
For maximum side-lobe decay windows,2,3,5,7,8,13,14
Proposed algorithm
Description of proposed algorithm
This section aims to elaborate the advantages of zero-padding technology and the interpolation algorithm. A new means will be proposed so that the integral and fractional parts of the spectrum can be quickly determined to hit the target of correction. A reasonable choice of spectral estimation parameters (such as sample frequency
where
Compared with equation (4), the following formula is obtained
Similarly, equation (7) can be reformulated as
where
The second term on the right in equation (12) represents the contribution from the imaginary part in the spectrum. If
Similarly, we have
Expanding the sine terms in equations (14b) and (14c) and combining them, we achieve that
Combining equations (14a) and (15) yields
We now introduce two variables
and
For simplicity and conciseness, in the following parts, we replace “=” in equation (16) with “≅,” but remember that the approximation relationship still remains. Now, equation (16) can be rewritten as
Expanding the terms
Because the value belongs to the interval
Extension for other classic windows with main lobe fitting
In the section above, we have deduced the interpolation for the Hanning window with zero padding. In this section, it will be extended for other classic windows with the main lobe fitting technique. Set
where
where
Experiment
The proposed algorithm is highly capable of spectrum estimation. In this section, the gas blower of a steel plant was selected as the research object to validate the speed and accuracy in mechanical fault diagnosis. Gas blowers may encounter different types of faults; one of the most common faults is shaft misalignment. Statistics show that 60% of the rotating mechanical faults are related to shaft misalignment. In this article, fault identification was performed in the case of shaft misalignment using the proposed method to determine the effectiveness of the new algorithm in practical application. To truly evaluate the ability to estimate the frequency deviation, the new algorithm was validated using the programming tools MATLAB 7.0 and VC 6.0. The normalized frequency deviation

Measurement site.
After a period of time, the fault spectrum on bush no. 3 of the gas blower obtained from the acceleration sensor is shown in Figure 2.

Time-domain waveform of bearing bush no. 3.
The time-domain waveform of the fault was estimated by the new algorithm; the frequency domain waveform is shown in Figure 3.

Estimated frequency spectrum of bearing bush no. 3.
Figure 3 shows that the fault characteristic frequency is 184.5 Hz, exactly three times the blower speed frequency (f = 61.5 Hz), and the shaft misalignment fault frequency is exactly 185 Hz. This analysis presented a preliminary result that a shaft misalignment fault occurred in the gas blower. Then workers were arranged to open the gas blower. The on-site inspection revealed that no. 2 and no. 3 shafts were indeed in misalignment. After the correction measure was taken, the fault phenomenon disappeared. It is now believed that the new algorithm has higher precision in terms of the spectral estimation of mechanical failure.
Study of noise influence
In the frequency correction, estimation accuracy under noisy conditions is an important indicator of the superiority of an algorithm. When noise is present and kept at a higher level, even if the SNR is set high enough to be much larger than the threshold value, the traditional methodologies for frequency correction may still estimate the correct spectral line in the wrong position. This occurrence in spectrum correction is often referred to as an incorrect polarity estimate (IPE). For example, the near-coherent sampling in two-point algorithms and nearly half of the cycle in three-point algorithms are prone to the IPE phenomenon. Regarding the occurrence of the IPE phenomenon, not only the signal inversion results but also the value
Fault signals of machinery and equipment often contain much noise. To verify the performance of the new algorithm against additive noise, this section will study the new algorithm in comparison with the conventional method. Before the comparative study was performed, it was assumed that there was a theoretical signal with additive noise, where the SNR was set as −5 dB, so that the correct polarity estimates may occur (IPE phenomenon). We set the step length as 0.025 Hz, the scanning frequency ranged from 255.5 to 256.5 Hz, and the random phase was uniformly distributed in a range of

Average absolute errors of various algorithms at the Hanning window (SNR = −5 dB).
Figure 4 exhibits three conventional algorithms with high estimation accuracy under additive noise conditions. As
The extreme values of the frequency error for each algorithm at the Hanning window.
Figures 5 and 6 show the estimated standard error of Hanning window and Blackman window, respectively. As seen from Figures 5 and 6, including the proposed algorithms, the results of each method at the Hanning window are basically the same as the simulation results in Figure 4.

Frequency error correction at Hanning window.

Frequency error correction of each method at Blackman window.
In summary, the simulation study shows that the conventional algorithms worked with low estimation errors under noisy conditions. For the standard deviation of the estimation error, the new algorithm is ranked the lowest of all algorithms, demonstrating its excellent anti-IPE performance. Additionally, the new algorithm may include other advantages. For conventional algorithms, the line spacing is defined as the frequency resolution; thus, the noise correlation may be significantly weakened. Moreover, the spectrum of this algorithm can be more powerful, where its spectral interval is only
Conclusion
Aiming at the fault spectral characteristics of a gas blower with random noise, based on zero-padding technology and the main lobe fitting techniques, a new frequency correction methodology was proposed based on interpolation DFT. Being simple, fast, and practical, the methodology is compatible with many other classic window functions. It does not need to know the spectral data window function or make any prior calculations. The cost is an increase in computation of FFT. Through computer simulation, the effectiveness of the new algorithm and conventional algorithms was compared and validated for a variety of window functions. Analysis of application instances showed that the new algorithm could be effectively used for the accurate correction of the fault spectrums of a gas blower and similar rotating machinery. Finally, the issue of spectrum correction error under noise conditions for the new algorithm and the conventional algorithms was also discussed. A comparative study and simulation results showed that the new algorithm presents less estimation error in the presence of noise and has a greater robustness against IPE. In summary, the new algorithm may be more powerful in resisting additive noise.
