Zebra tape identification for the instantaneous angular speed computation and angular resampling of motorbike valve train measurements

An experimental test campaign was performed on the valve train of a racing motorbike engine in order to get insight into the dynamic of the system. In particular the valve motion was acquired in cold test conditions by means of a laser vibrometer able to acquire displacement and velocity signals. The valve time-dependent measurements needed to be referred to the camshaft angular position in order to analyse the data in the angular domain, as usually done for rotating machines. To this purpose the camshaft was fitted with a zebra tape whose dark and light stripes were tracked by means of an optical probe. Unfortunately, both manufacturing and mounting imperfections of the employed zebra tape, resulting in stripes with slightly different widths, precluded the possibility to directly obtain the correct relationship between camshaft angular position and time. In order to overcome this problem, the identification of the zebra tape was performed by means of the original and practical procedure that is the focus of the present paper. The method consists of three main steps: namely, an ad-hoc test corresponding to special operating conditions, the computation of the instantaneous angular speed, and the final association of the stripes with the corresponding shaft angular position. The results reported in the paper demonstrate the suitability of the simple procedure for the zebra tape identification performed with the final purpose to implement a computed order tracking technique for the data analysis. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.