Reducing measurement time for a laser Doppler vibrometer using regressive techniques

In the last decade the laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) has become a widely spread instrument for measuring vibrations. It often offers accurate measurements with a high spatial resolution. However, the measurement time of the LDV and especially for the scanning LDV is long. Therefore, reducing the measurement time is an attractive objective. A way to achieve this is to use a single sine excitation (on a resonance frequency). However, this technique has two major drawbacks: the inability to provide information on the damping and a operational deflection shape that can differ from the true mode shape. In this article two methods will be introduced to reduce measurement time without these defaults. In the first method introduced in this article a narrow band multisine is used as excitation signal and the measured vibration signal in the time domain is represented by a model using sines and cosines with these fixed narrow band frequencies. The coefficients of those sines and cosines are then estimated on a global scale by means of a least-squares estimator. An important advantage of this particular technique is that one does not have to measure a full period of the signal, reducing time. The second method accelerates the measurement time for scanning LDV measurements. Using the time domain sequence from each previous scan point and a limited number of time samples from the current scan point, the full time domain sequence of the current scan point can be estimated. Both these methods are a key benefit for in-line quality control, which can have upwards of 1000 spatial measurement locations. The proposed techniques will be validated on both simulations and experiments of varying complexity.