Integrated study of time-frequency representations and their applications in source identification of mechanical noise

Three computation schemes of time-frequency representations have been developed and implemented to identify different components of mechanical noise emitted from the transmission system of electrical vehicles. This study explores the close relationships between three time-frequency representations, i.e. the spectrogram based on windowed Fourier transform, the Wigner-Ville distribution, and the smoothed Wigner-Ville distribution. One main purpose is to pursue the efficiency of computing the smoothed Wigner-Ville distribution of a dynamic signature. The revised scheme can tremendously reduce the computation time to a scale of around 1/90, compared with the original scheme. To assess the validation of these time-frequency representation schemes, firstly, four synthetic signals are designed and processed. Secondly, the developed time-frequency representations are applied to distinguish different spectral components of transmission noise, and identify their sources. This study takes an electrical scooter with a continuous variable transmission system as a test bench. The continuous-variable-transmission-belt noise, helical-gear whine noise, and fan noise can be clearly identified via the processing of the time-frequency representations. These obtained conclusions can be used as references for machine element modification to reduce annoying noise.