Hand-held "Sound Camera" Shows You the Source of Noises

Zothecula writes "If you work with machinery, engines or appliances of any type, then you've likely experienced the frustration of hearing a troublesome noise coming from somewhere, but not being able to pinpoint where. If only you could just grab a camera, and take a picture that showed you the noise's location. Well, soon you should be able to do so, as that's just what the SeeSV-S205 sound camera does."

Screwdriver

[vikingpower]

Old but cool mechanic's trick: use a screwdriver. Place the metal against a running engine, put the ( plastic or wood ) handle against your ear. Hear amazing things inside of the running engine.

Open source sound localization

[jmv]

Don't know about this particular project, but back when I did my PhD, I open-sourced my sound localization algorithm [sourceforge.net]. Tracks up to ~4 moving sound sources in real-time using 8 microphones.

Wheel balancing

[Okian Warrior]

We were using a variant of this to help balance helicopter blades. Put accelerometers on the frame, [carefully] run up the engine while tethered, analyze the vibration, advise the tech how to adjust the blade weights, and repeat. Eventually you get well-balanced blades.

A similar system could diagnose wheel and tire issues. Mount an accelerometer and a microphone on the frame near each of the wheels and try to detect vibration and/or frequencies that correlate with wheel or shaft rotation, and frame vibration.

I'd love to have an onboard diagnostic that shows an X-ray diagram of the engine drive-train, with green/yellow/red circles around the various parts and listings detailing the type of part and level of health.

You could also implement active balance compensation.

You can never balance anything exactly perfect, but if you can measure and analyze the balance you can compensate for minor imperfections. An electromagnet mounted near a shaft can "pull" the shaft slightly at the right point in its rotation, compensating for a tiny amount of imbalance.

For small values of "compensate", you can tune your mechanical system to be much quieter and have much less wear. The same system can measure the amount of compensation needed, and alert the user when the engine exceeds the system's ability to compensate.

Lots of interesting possibilities here for active computer-control of mechanical systems.