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Synchronous Averaging

Synchronous averaging is a technique used to reduce background noise in vibration waveforms by averaging the signal over multiple cycles that are triggered at the same point. This emphasizes the parts of the signal that are synchronized to the trigger while averaging out random noise and other asynchronous components. When applied to machine vibration, using a tachometer trigger synchronized to a rotating component like a gear allows isolation of the vibration caused by that component by averaging out everything else. This can be used to detect issues like a damaged tooth on a gear that would be obscured in a normal vibration spectrum.

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39 views

Synchronous Averaging

Synchronous averaging is a technique used to reduce background noise in vibration waveforms by averaging the signal over multiple cycles that are triggered at the same point. This emphasizes the parts of the signal that are synchronized to the trigger while averaging out random noise and other asynchronous components. When applied to machine vibration, using a tachometer trigger synchronized to a rotating component like a gear allows isolation of the vibration caused by that component by averaging out everything else. This can be used to detect issues like a damaged tooth on a gear that would be obscured in a normal vibration spectrum.

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uamiranda3518
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31/10/2017 Synchronous Averaging

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Synchronous Averaging

Synchronous averaging, also sometimes redundantly called “Time Synchronous averaging”, was discussed
earlier as a method of background noise reduction in spectra of complex signals. Now, we will look at it as a
means of greatly increasing the information we can extract from the time-domain vibration waveform.
Synchronous averaging is a fundamentally different process than the usual spectrum averaging that is
generally done in FFT analysis. It is used to greatly reduce the effects of unwanted noise in the measurement.
The waveform itself is averaged in a time buffer before the FFT is calculated, and the sampling of the signal
is initiated by a trigger pulse input to the analyzer. If the trigger pulse is synchronized with the repetition rate
of the signal in question, the averaging process will gradually eliminate the random noise because it is not
synchronized with the trigger. However, the signal that is synchronous with the trigger will be emphasized,
as shown below:

When you do time domain averaging on the vibration signal from a real machine, the averaged time record
gradually accumulates those portions of the signal that are synchronized with the trigger, and other parts of
the signal, such as noise and any other components such as other rotating parts of the machine, etc., are
effectively averaged out. This is the only type of averaging that actually does reduce noise.

An important application of time synchronous averaging is in the waveform analysis of machine vibration,
especially in the case of gear drives. In this case, the trigger is derived from a tachometer that provides one
pulse per revolution of a gear in a machine. This way, the time samples are synchronized in that they all
begin at the same exact point in the angular position of the gear.
Consider a gearbox containing a pinion with 13 teeth and a driven gear with 31 teeth. If a tachometer is
connected to the pinion shaft, and its output is used to trigger an analyzer capable of time synchronous
averaging, the averaged waveform will gradually exclude vibration components from everything except the
events related to the pinion revolution. Any vibration caused by the driven gear will be averaged out, and the
resulting waveform will show the vibration caused by each individual tooth on the pinion.

Note that in the figure above, the lower averaged waveform indicates one damaged tooth on the pinion.

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