Patent ID: 7272536

Claim:
A method for determining immanence of catastrophic failure for a selected tire among a plurality of tires that are concurrently in operation, the method comprising the steps of: selecting a tire from the plurality of tires; monitoring vibration amplitude versus time signals for the selected tire; using signal averaging to minimize signal noise in the selected tire's vibration signals; at selected intervals, fast Fourier transforming the averaged vibration signals to create a harmonic spectrum for the selected tire; cleaning the selected tire's harmonic spectrum by applying coherence function and averaging calculations to it for minimizing contributions to the selected tire's harmonic spectrum from all other vibration sources including the remaining one(s) of the plurality of tires; comparing the most recent cleaned spectrum with stored values of previous cleaned spectra of the selected tire to track changes in higher order harmonic magnitudes; determining whether catastrophic failure of the selected tire is immanent by analyzing the changes in higher order harmonic magnitudes and comparing them with predetermined failure critera; and issuing a warning when the method determines that catastrophic failure is immanent for the selected tire, thereby enabling appropriate actions in response by an operator or machine controller.