Locating Damaging Segments in the Acceleration Signal of an Automotive Coil Spring using the Wavelet Transform

Abstract

This work presents a wavelet-based analysis for locating higher amplitude segments of an acceleration signal. The acceleration signal was measured at an automotive coil spring driven on a public road surface using an accelerometer and a data acquisition to record the signal. The wavelet coefficient provided the energy distributions of a particular time and frequency. The energy was then utilized to locate the damaging segments in the acceleration signal. When the damaging segments were recombined into a single acceleration signal, it has an equivalent behavior with less than 10 % difference in terms of statistical parameters. It proved that the method successfully located the damaging segments in the acceleration signal.