Indicators of cyclostationarity: proposal, statistical evaluation and application to diagnostics

The paper proposes new and simple indicators of cyclostationarity for the characterization of stochastic processes whose statistics are periodically varying with respect to some generic variables. Indicators of cyclostationarity from first to fourth order are introduced and their statistical properties are derived. In order to illustrate the use of these indicators, an application to the diagnosis of spalling in a gearbox is described. Results demonstrate their effectiveness for discriminating between different cyclostationary states.