Oct 22, 2015 - the health monitoring of nuclear power plants, which is of extreme impor- tance to ... The present reviewer suspects that the book grew ... vibration-related technology and engineering often âdo not fully compre- hend the ... industrial case studies, and our teaching often takes place at plant sites to.
BOOK REVIEWS P. L. Marston Physics Department, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington 99164 These reviews of books and other forms of information express the opinions of the individual reviewers and are not necessarily endorsed by the Editorial Board of this Journal. (Published online 22 October 2015)
Vibration Analysis, Instruments, and Signal Processing Jyoti Kumar Sinha CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2015, 314 pp. Price: $95.96 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-4822-3144-1 The targeted readership of this relatively short book appears to be persons who are concerned with vibration-based condition monitoring. The realm of applications, while specialized, is very large, and includes the health monitoring of nuclear power plants, which is of extreme importance to populations in locations close to such plants. The book’s author directs a one-year Master of Science program (apparently without a required written thesis) within the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom (UK), the program having the title of Reliability Engineering and Asset Management (REAM). The present reviewer suspects that the book grew out of lectures that the author gave within this program. The reviewer gathers from remarks made by the author in his preface that the author has “consistently observed” that persons involved in vibration-related technology and engineering often “do not fully comprehend the interrelation between theory and experiments.” The reviewer agrees with this assessment, but nevertheless believes that, at least within the United States, those engineers having a typical MS-level education in mechanical engineering, providing they get a good grounding in the theoretical fundamentals of vibrations, taught with an emphasis on engineering applications, gradually and eventually close this “comprehension-gap” when they actually get immersed in experimental work after leaving school. If they do a thesis or extended project with a sizable experimental component, the closing of the gap is greatly accelerated. The program at Manchester is considerably different from the U.S. norm and is somewhat enviable because the students are extensively exposed to the actual use of experimental equipment and commercial software. As the author states on the program’s website: “Our teaching style is unique compared to other postgraduate engineering courses. All of the units are explained through industrial case studies, and our teaching often takes place at plant sites to demonstrate the real world application of theory.” For the world outside the REAM program at Manchester, one might properly ask whether the book would be appropriate as a textbook for a typical graduate course, or upper division undergraduate course, in vibrations. The answer would probably be no. There are no problems at the ends of the chapters, and the theoretical discussions are brief and they gloss over the details that a beginning student would need. For example, the standard differential equation for a spring-mass system is written down with no derivation, and without even a cursory mention of Newton’s second law or of Hooke’s law, on page 6. The standard solution as a sum of a sine and a cosine is written down, with a prefatory remark: “it is known that the system undergoes cyclic (harmonic) motion.” Many students may already be well-familiar with all this, but it seems rather cavalier to assume that all potential readers are. (They may have been
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 138 (4), October 2015
exposed to this, at one time or another, in their undergraduate studies, but they may have forgotten this. Most would falter if they were asked to give a rigorous explanation of such material.) The coverage within the book appears to be considerably specialized. The topics of vibration control and noise reduction appear to not be covered, and the related topic of active control of vibrations appears to not even be mentioned. To be fair, it should be stated that a typical modern-day undergraduate text on vibrations, such as those by Rao and Inman, has a length of 600 to 1000 pages, while Sinha’s book only has 314 pages. The merging of vibrations and signal processing in a single book is admirable, but the brevity of the book and the author’s style of writing hardly does justice to each—the depth is simply not there. In the curricula with which the present reviewer is acquainted, these are generally covered in separate courses, although a good undergraduate text in vibrations will give some discussion of signal processing to the extent it is ordinarily used in vibration applications. The book does, nevertheless, have attractive features. There are many illustrations, and some of these can be helpful to one trying to understand the text. Persons already familiar with the basics of vibration theory and some of its applications may find perusing the text to be helpful in their professional work. The author writes relatively well, and the text tends to flow smoothly (although a critical reader will probably frequently balk at blindly accepting various unsupported assertions that appear throughout the book). The author does, however, seem to have a habit of using unnecessary and nonstandard acronyms, such as DI for direct integration, DF for damping factor, MS for mode superposition, and HPP for half-power point. As a work of scholarship, the book is disappointing. There are few references in the early chapters and the selection seems to be capricious. The history of the subject of vibrations is not discussed at all and there is no mention of Galileo, Huygens, Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Rayleigh, Lamb, Whittaker, Bishop, and den Hartog. In regard to signal processing, there is no mention of Fourier, Parseval, Wiener, or Tukey. There appear to be no references at all to articles in the leading scholarly peer-reviewed journals dealing with vibrations, such as the The Journal of Sound and Vibration and the ASME Journal of Vibrations and Acoustics. There are, of course, no references to The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The bulk of the references appear to be by the author himself. The last chapter, for example, has 23 references, of which 16 were authored or coauthored by Sinha. Several of these articles were published in the Elsevier journal, Nuclear Engineering and Design, and this supports the reviewer’s contention that much of the material should be of interest to vibration engineers working in the nuclear power industry. The book is recommended to anyone having some prior acquaintance with the subject of vibration and who desires an overview with practical examples and case studies of those topics that are of principal importance to vibration-based condition monitoring. ALLAN D. PIERCE
Sandwich, MA
0001-4966/2015/138(4)/2349/1/$30.00
C 2015 Acoustical Society of America V
2349
Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 71.174.149.99 On: Tue, 19 Jan 2016 16:29:53
