Method and system for vibration signal processing

A method of vibration signal processing comprising the steps of:

• measuring the vibration of a machine using one or more sensors to obtain electrical vibration signals;
• conditioning the electrical vibration signals;
• high-pass filtering the conditioned signals;
• converting the high-pass filtered electrical vibration signals into digital vibration samples;
• dividing the digital vibration samples into equal time intervals and, for each time interval, rectifying the digital vibration samples and determining the arithmetic mean of the rectified digital vibration samples;
• buffering the mean digital vibration samples to create a time waveform representing the mean digital vibration samples;
• and
• processing the time waveform as if it were an independently-detected signal.

A system for vibration signal processing comprising:

• one or more vibration sensors to generate electrical vibration signals representing sensed mechanical vibrations;
• a conditioning circuit to condition the electrical vibration signals;
• a high-pass filter circuit;
• an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) to convert the high-pass filtered electrical vibration signals into digital vibration samples;
• an averaging circuit configured to divide the digital vibration samples into equal time intervals, the averaging circuit including a rectifier to rectify the digital vibration samples in each time interval, and an averager to determine the arithmetic mean or root mean square (RMS) of the rectified digital vibration samples in each time interval;
• and
• a buffer to receive the mean of the rectified digital vibration samples of each time interval, and to output the samples as a time waveform for further analysis.