Beamforming for quality control in industrial environment

Abstract

This work presents the application of beamforming for the quality control of washing machine in industrial application. The objective is to substitute sensors like accelerometers or Laser Doppler Vibrometers in order to acquire vibration emission of a machine and use that information for the diagnosis of the quality status. The main problem is related to the industrial environment in which the noise level, due to production process or the test of other machine, reduce the Signal-to-Noise of acoustic based techniques. In this paper a small microphone array is used to acquire acoustic emission of the machine. Beamforming algorithm is used to focus the microphone sensitivity and to avoid disturbance of surrounding environment and other machines. The performance of the proposed technique is also evaluated by comparison with LDV measurement in controlled conditions in an anechoic chamber and in a reverberant environment, with different level and kind of disturbing noise in order to qualify the proposed technique. ©2010 Society for Experimental Mechanics Inc.