Exploratory data analysis of the Poincare features of the

electrical torque oriented to the severity diagnosis of the

tooth breakage of a gearbox

* Corresponding Author

Abstract. This paper develops the exploratory data analysis of the Poincaré
features extracted from the electrical torque of an induction motor coupled to
a gearbox under different severity levels of the failure mode related to the
tooth breakage. This research was developed because of the sensibility of the
electrical torque faced to the mechanical failure in its load. Several features
were extracted from the Poincaré plots of the electrical torque, and feature
selection was applied by using different techniques such as ReliefF, Chi-2
and a cluster validity index. Boxplots and t-SNE were used to visualize the
data distribution regarding nine different fault severities related to the tooth
breakage. These graphics show Poincaré features are discriminative to
separate some set of fault severity.
Keywords: Fault diagnosis, fault severity, tooth breakage, gearboxes,
Poincaré features.

1 Introduction

One of the elements for the success of industrial production is the maintenance to
avoid unexpected plant shutdown and improve the useful life of the devices
involved in the process. Condition based maintenance is an alternative into the
maintenance activities to known early the health state of a device [1]. Particularly,
gearboxes are important rotating machines, because their role in the mechanical
power transmition. Most of the complex industrial process are dependant of such a
device, then, methods and techniques for conditon monitoring are reported in the
literature [2,3]. Several signals can be used for gearbox monitoring, being the
vibration the most popular [4,5]. However, the searching of new informative signals
for fault diagnosis of rotating machines is still an open problems. Electrical torque
provided by the induction motor coupled to a mechanical device as gearbox has
been identified as a fault sensitive signal. The perfomance of that signal regarding
the vibration signal was compared in [6], by analizing the FFT and power spectrum,
showing that such electrical torque exibith evident changen when the tooth breakage
appears. On the other hand, nowdays, data-driven approaches are escential tools to
propose fault classifers for complex systems [7,8]; this approach han been widely
reported where vibration, current, acoustic emmision signals has been used with
succes [9]. Although deep learning approaches have facilitated the building of data
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driven based fault classifiers, shallow models adjusted by machine learning

techniques still atrack interest because their intrepretability [10]. Besides the signal
selection, feaure extraction and selection are challenged tasks for developing
shallow classifiers, and this is the problem addressed in this work by using Poincaré
plot and its related features [11,12]. After feature extraction, feature selection is
performe by using ReliefF, Chi-2 and a cluster validity index [9,13]. Boxplots and
t-SNE plots are used to show that Poincaré features generate proper data clusters in
the feature space, useful for the further development of shadow classifiers.

2 Background

2.1 Poincaré Plot and feature extraction

A Poincaré plot is a plot to quantify the self-similarity of a time series to discover a

chaotic behavior; it has been widely used for analyzing biomedical signals [14].
Being the gearbox a highly nonlinear system, this signal processing tool is useful
for feature extraction. Let x(t) be a times series and x(t+ τ) its corresponding lagged
representation, by considering the lag τ. The Poincaré plot can be built in simple
manner by plotting x(t+ τ) vs x(t) [14]. The lag τ can be selected as the time for
which x(t) and x(t+ τ) has, or is near to, zero-crossing autocorrelation. A signal can
have several zero-crossing, but usually the first zero-crossing is selected. For a
signal data base, the lag selection can be based on the autocorrelation average.
Figure 1(a) shows a typical plot of self-correlation of x(t+ τ) vs x(t) for different
lags, showing the first zero-crossing occurs at τ=614. After that, a Poincaré plot of
the signal is obtained, as in Figure 1(b).

Fig. 1. Autocorrelation of x(t+ τ) vs x(t)

Finally, eleven features, or attributes, are computed from the Poincaré Plot such as
the standard deviation of the points generating perpendicular lines along y = x, the
standard deviation of the points generating perpendicular lines along y = -x, the
convex hull, among other statistical features related to the shape of the Poincaré
plot.
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2.2 Feature selection

ReliefF and Chi-2 are two of the supervised feature ranking techniques using in this
work. Details about these ones can be revised in [9]. ReleifF algorithm estimates
the quality of the attributes regarding the ability to discriminate neighbor instances,
by calculating their K-nearest-neighbors. A weighted vector W is created for each
feature to identify the feature producing the high difference between neighbors of
different classes. The high value of W the best qualification to the feature. Similarly,
Chi-2 is a statistical technique for feature ranking that measure the independency of
the occurrence between attributes and classes, if a non-dependence between an
attribute and a class is not identified, then the attributed is discarded. On the other
hand, this work applies a clustering-based feature selection that implement a cluster
validity assessment. This approach is performed in two phases: (i) the first phase
applies ANOVA to retain the most informative individual features, and (ii) the
second phase identifies the best group of those selected features generating proper
cluster structures of classes in the feature space by using a cluster validity index,
called Composing Density Between and With clusters (CDbw) to assess the
compactness and separation of clusters [13]

2.3 Test bed and data acquisition

The test bed for measuring the current and voltage signals is depicted in Figure 2,
and it is composed by a gearbox powered by a 2 Hp induction motor, with nominal
speed of 1100 rpm.

Fig. 2. Test bed and sensors placement

A constant load is coupled to the gearbox through a magnetic break which can be
adjusted up to 3 loads: L1, L2, L3 corresponding to no-load and loads due to 10 V
and 20 V. The one stage gearbox has a faulty pinion due to different severity levels
of tooth breakage in one tooth. Several sensors are attached properly on the gearbox,
such as acoustic emission sensors, current clamp meters, voltage sensor,
microphones, and accelerometers, which are connected to a DAQ (NIcDAQ) and
the simples are collected by a signal processing software developed in LabVIEW.
All sensors have a sample frequency of 50KHz, excepting the acoustic emission
sensors that has 1MHz. For this work, we only use the current and voltage signals
of the rotor to calculate the electrical torque, by Eq. (1):
(1)
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where np is the number of poles of the induction motor, e is the stator flux, ie is the
rotor current, and the arrows stand for the spatial vector representation. The flux is
calculated according to Eq. (2):

(2)

where ve is the rotor voltage, and Re is the equivalent resistance of the rotor
inductances.
Samples of 10 s length and 10 repetitions under each load configuration were
recorded for each of the nine severity levels (classes) of tooth breakage, from P1 to
the healthy state to P9 for the 100% tooth breakage; then, 30 signals for each class
is stored in the data base, for a total of 270 signals.

3 Results

Once the database of current and voltage signals is available, we compute the
electrical torque, according to Eq. (1). A data augmentation procedure was
implemented to increase the number of samples, by applying a sliding window
along to the whole signal, with an overlapping size of 0.1 s and 1 s length; then,
each original sample produce 90 new signals. Due to the electrical torque has a DC
component, a zero mean transformation was applied to eliminate the offset. The
average lag = was selected from the average self-correlation of all the signals.
After computing the Poincaré Plot for each signal, the eleven features were
extracted and rescaling over the interval [0,1]. Thus, we have a rescaled corpus
matrix of 24300 samples and 11 features.

3.1 Exploratory data analysis over all features

Figure 3 shows the boxplot for all the features in the case of P1 and P9. The figure
shows that data distributions in case of P1 is quite different than in case of P9. More
of the data are over 0.5 for all the features in P1, and bellow of 0.5 for P9. This is a
significant behavior for fault diagnosis purposes. Figure 4 shows the data
distribution for the feature SD and Cup in case of all the fault severities. We can see
that SD is a discriminative feature for the set of severities P1-P2-P6, P1-P4-P5 and
P7-P8-P9. Instead, it looks that Cup is not a proper discriminative feature.

3.2 Exploratory data analysis over set of features

After applying the feature selection by ReliefF and CDbw, the best result is obtained
with CDbw. Chi-2 is not able to rank the features. Figure 5 shows the data
distribution for the set of the 3 best attributes selected by the latter method. To
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visualize the distribution regarding P1 (healthy state), the figure shows different sets
of faults. We can see that this set of 3 features produce separated clusters among the
set of fault severities.

(a) (b)

Fig. 3. Data distribution: (a) P1, (b) P9

(a) (b)

Fig. 4. Data distribution: (a) SD, (b) Cup

Fig. 5. Data distribution after feature selection

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4 Conclusions

Electrical torque and Poincaré features arise as alternative and discriminative signal
and features, respectively, for fault diagnosis purposes. The data distribution of the
Poincaré features shows that they can discriminate among different failures. Future
work aims at developing the shallow classifiers with those significant selected
features.

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