Applications of time-frequency analysis to signals from manufacturing and machine monitoring sensors

Manufacturing industries are now demanding substantial increases in flexibility, productivity and reliability from their process machines as well as increased quality and value of their products. One important strategy to support this goal is sensor-based, on-line, real-time evaluation of key characteristics of both machines and products, throughout the manufacturing process. Recent advances in time-frequency (TF) analysis are particularly well suited to extracting key vibrational characteristics from monitoring sensors. Thus this paper presents applications of TF analysis to several important manufacturing and machine monitoring tasks, to show the value of these forms of digital signal processing applied to manufacturing.