Signature analysis of mechanical watch movements

This paper presents a new application of the signature analysis for mechanical watch movements. Contrary to the existing method, it analyzes the time–frequency features of a mechanical watch movement through a combination of two well-known techniques: reassigned time–frequency distributions (RTFD) and finite element analysis (FEA). By mapping the signal into a two-dimensional domain of time and frequency, RTFD reveals the frequency components at different time of the movement, while FEA gives the theoretical frequency response of the movements. By comparing the frequency components at different time of the movements to the theoretical frequency response of the movement, various malfunctions of the movement can then be detected. The effectiveness of the presented method is tested for some specific fault diagnosing examples. For completeness, a brief introduction of RTFD is given in the Appendix.