Estimation of signal coherence threshold and concealed spectral lines applied to detection of turbofan engine combustion noise.

Combustion noise from turbofan engines has become important, as the noise from sources like the fan and jet are reduced. An aligned and un-aligned coherence technique has been developed to determine a threshold level for the coherence and thereby help to separate the coherent combustion noise source from other noise sources measured with far-field microphones. This method is compared with a statistics based coherence threshold estimation method. In addition, the un-aligned coherence procedure at the same time also reveals periodicities, spectral lines, and undamped sinusoids hidden by broadband turbofan engine noise. In calculating the coherence threshold using a statistical method, one may use either the number of independent records or a larger number corresponding to the number of overlapped records used to create the average. Using data from a turbofan engine and a simulation this paper shows that applying the Fisher z-transform to the un-aligned coherence can aid in making the proper selection of samples and produce a reasonable statistics based coherence threshold. Examples are presented showing that the underlying tonal and coherent broad band structure which is buried under random broadband noise and jet noise can be determined. The method also shows the possible presence of indirect combustion noise.