Troels Dyhr Pedersen.indd - Solid Mechanics
Troels Dyhr Pedersen.indd - Solid Mechanics
Troels Dyhr Pedersen.indd - Solid Mechanics
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time interval while maintaining a high frequency resolution, a short length of samples can<br />
be extended with a tail of zero values. This is referred to as zero padding. The zero values<br />
do not affect the analysis, so this approach is very useful when a limited sample length<br />
must be analyzed.<br />
The FFT algorithm calculates the amplitude of the frequencies in the signal, given by the<br />
frequency resolution f. The output from the analysis consists of the frequencies and<br />
their respective amplitudes, as well as phasing information. A graphic representation is<br />
then used to identify the dominating frequencies.<br />
Figure 16: FFT representation of cylinder pressure, engine acceleration and acoustic noise<br />
The particular set of data used in figure 16 illustrates that although a range of high<br />
frequencies are dominating the cylinder pressure signal as well as the accelerometer<br />
signal, the majority of the sound pressure is caused by frequencies from 1-3 kHz, which<br />
is the engine resonance frequencies.<br />
The disadvantage of the frequency domain representation is that the frequency content<br />
changes in time. The graphs can therefore represent either a small time step of the time<br />
domain accurately, or a larger time step less accurately, based on an average value. The<br />
only way to represent the development in frequency content is to use a frequency<br />
spectrum analysis.<br />
11.6.5 Frequency spectrum analysis in the time domain<br />
A frequency spectrum chart is suitable for studying the frequencies in the time domain.<br />
The frequencies can be displayed in the time domain by splitting up the signal into small<br />
overlapping intervals and apply the FFT procedure on each interval. The output of the<br />
analysis is an intensity chart with three dimensions: time on the x-axis, frequency on the<br />
y-axis and amplitude on the z-axis. The plot can be made in three dimensions, but the zvalues<br />
are here defined by a color scale to make the plot two-dimensional. To create these<br />
charts, a 256 sample length windowed section of the high pass filtered signal is analyzed<br />
by FFT. This is done in an interval progressing one CAD with each iteration.