Generalized Roughness Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Using Time Series Analysis and Gradient Boosted

Tree
1st Mojtaba Afshar 2nd Mehrdad Heydarzadeh
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Texas at Dallas University of Texas at Dallas
Richardson, TX, USA Richardson, TX, USA
mojtaba.afshar@UTDallas.edu mehhey@UTDallas.edu

3rd Bilal Akin

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
2022 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE) | 978-1-7281-9387-8/22/$31.00 ©2022 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ECCE50734.2022.9947401

University of Texas at Dallas

Richardson, TX, USA
bilal.akin@UTDallas.edu

Abstract—Generalized roughness bearing faults are the most
commonly reported ones in rotating machine failures. Early
detection of bearing faults plays a vital role in minimizing
operation losses. This paper aims to develop a real-time condition
monitoring for bearing faults and for this purpose a sensory
system to measure 3 axes vibration is developed. A time series
model is proposed for vibration signals to extract features
accurately. These features are classified using gradient boosted
trees (GBT). GBT is an ensemble of trees and is optimal for
parallel evaluation with relatively low cost. The proposed feature
extraction algorithm also has a low computational cost. Overall,
the proposed algorithm has very low latency and computational
cost which enables fault diagnosis through embedded processors.
This algorithm can diagnose five different faults with a promising
accuracy of 98.5%, which is calculated for different load and
speed conditions.
Index Terms—bearing fault detection, generalized roughness
fault, Gradient Boosted Tree
I. I NTRODUCTION
A. Motivation
Permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM) have been
increasingly used in industry due to their power density and
efficiency. Due to the severe operating conditions, predictive
maintenance is mostly necessary to reduce unexpected ma-
chine downtime and prevent catastrophic failure [1]. Most
common failures in electrical machines are due to bearing
faults, stator winding faults and rotor faults which among
them bearing faults are about 41% of the all-machine failures
[2]. Rolling element bearings are an indispensable part of the
industrial rotating machines which support and locate the rotor
to keep the air gap small and consistent. If the bearing faults
are detected at their early stage, timely maintenance can be
scheduled to prevent accidents or total failures [3].
Bearings consist of four components including outer and
inner raceways, balls, and cage. Bearing faults are categorized
as localized and generalized roughness bearing faults. In
the case of localized fault, a single point defect exists on
only one bearing component producing a specific vibration
pattern. On the other hand, generalized bearing faults occur
when the bearing surfaces degrade or roughen due to wrong
maintenance which leads to growing fault among the bearing
components and produces signatures at the characteristic fault
frequencies [4]. Root cause analyses show that, in industry,
generalized bearing faults are mainly due to poor lubri-
cation,contamination, electrical erosion, moisture corrosion,
wrong installation and etc. [5].
B. Prior Work
Most of the recent studies mainly focus on the detection and
classification of the localized bearing faults on either raceways
or balls [6]. On the other hand, few studies investigate the dis-
tributed bearing fault even though they are the most common
type of bearing fault in the industry [7]–[9]. In [7] generalized
bearing fault vibration patterns were investigated and feature
indices were proposed to distinguish localized and generalized
bearing faults using vibration analysis but limited to inner
race and outer race generalized faults at full speed. Authors
in [8] studied generalized faults on the balls of bearings in
high speed machine and proposed a new criterion to detect
bearing fault and predict the remaining useful life. Another
study in [9] analyzed generalized faults on bearing balls. They
utilized kurtogram to identify the bandwidth where the fault
effect is stronger and calculated its energy to detect faults. The
challenge with this method is that the method is sensitive to
PWM harmonics, switching noise and rotational speed of the
machine.
Various methods such as temperature, stray flux, acoustic
emission, and vibration analysis have been applied to detect
bearing faults in rotating electrical machines [10] Vibration

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 signals due to their inherent characteristics are widely used
for bearing fault diagnosis. Most of the recent studies focus
on localized bearing fault detection based on vibration analysis
using techniques such as time domain, frequency domain
and time- frequency domain methods [11]–[13]. However, to
improve current methods three factor should be considered:
(i) study more common faults in industry (ii) propose low
computational cost method (iii) implement a real-time method.
C. Key Contribution
In this paper, a real-time bearing fault detection algorithm
has been proposed to detect and classify generalized roughness
bearing faults. The proposed algorithm has low latency with
high accuracy and can detect and classify different bearing
faults under different load and speed conditions. For this
purpose, a sensory system is developed to measure 3 axes
vibration. The 3 axes vibration signals have been measured
for healthy and faulty conditions including 1 localized bearing
faults and 4 generalized roughness bearing faults under various
loads, speeds and severities for a PMSM. Then, autoregres-
sive (AR) model is proposed to extract features from vibration
signal accurately. These features are classified using gradient
boosted trees (GBT). The following are the key contributions
of this work:
• 4 different generalized roughness bearing faults which
are the most common bearing fault in industry are exper-
imentally tested on PMSM.
• The bearing faults are comprehensively analyzed for 50
different operating conditions under 10 different speeds
and 5 different loads.
• Generalized bearing faults are detected and classified
using a novel diagnostic method in real-time.
II. S IGNAL P ROCESSING P IPELINE
The block diagram of the proposed monitoring system
is depicted in Fig. 1. The first stage is building a time
series model for the sensory data. For each window of the
measurement, an AR model is estimated. Then, the parameters
of the model are used as features and fed to the next stage
which is a gradient boosted tree (GBT) classification. The
classifier diagnose the input. The parametric modeling allows
us to extract a small-size features from a large window of the
signal. In addition to dimension reduction, if the window size
is selected reasonable, these features show robustness against
a shift in time. Moreover, having the time series model one
can estimate spectrum of the time series. So, these features
do spectral analysis implicitly. In the following each block
diagram is explained briefly.
Figure 1: Signal processing pipeline for proposed method.
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A. Time Series Model
In this study it is assumed that the sensory measurements
conform an AR model. The AR assumption has been used in
literature before. In this work, this assumption is verified again
by applying hypothesis testing. Equation 1 defines AR model
for a stationary random process S(n).
p
X
S(n) = − ai S(n − i) + ϵ(n) (1)
i=1
where ϵ[n] is a zero mean white noise process with variance
of σϵ2 , ai s and p are model parameters and model order re-
spectively. We assume the vibration readings from the sensory
system follows such model. There are different algorithms for
tuning the model parameters (ai s) [14]. Here, we focus on the
Burg method, which minimizes the prediction error forward
and backward. Forward prediction means predicting x[n] using
x[n−1], · · · , x[n−p] and backward means predicting x[n−p]
using x[n], · · · , x[n − p + 1]. For more about the optimization
for finding model parameters one can refer to [14]. Equation
1 can be written as:
p
X
ϵ(n) = ai S(n − i) (2)
i=0
where a0 = 1. Equation 2 has the form of a Finite Impulse
Response (FIR) filter. One way of implementing a digital FIR
filter is the lattice structure in which a filter of order p is
implemented as p cascaded first order lattice building elements
defined as:
(
fj (n) = fj−1 (n) + kj bj−1 (n − 1)
(3)
bj (n) = bj−1 (n) + kj fj−1 (n − 1)
where kj is a scalar usually referred to as the reflection
coefficient at the j th stage. fj (n) and bj (n) are called the j th
forward and backward prediction errors respectively. Here, a
filter with order of p is decomposed to a cascade of p first
order building elements. The the first element is fed by the
input (e.g. vibration) signal, f0 (n) = b0 (n) = V (n) and the
last element’s output is the filter’s output, fp (n) = ϵ(n).
Burg method minimizes of the forward and backward pre-
diction errors to tune kj s’. When a training signal with L
samples is available, the coefficients are calculated as [14]:
PL−1
−2 n=j fj−1 (n)bj−1 (n − 1)
kj = PL−1   (4)
2 2
n=j fj−1 (n) + bj−1 (n − 1)
Also, it is needed that the model order (p) in Equation 1 to
be specified. Choosing p correctly is important. If p is too
low, the model cannot capture statistical properties of V [n]
and a too large order, will result in a model too sensitive
to noise and show spurious peaks in the spectrum of signal.
Here, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) criteria is used
for choosing p. For more information the reader can review
[14].
Having the p, one can form the vector of reflection coef-
ficients as k = [k1 , k2 , · · · , kp ]t . Here, we use Vector k as
 feature representation of a window of measured signal. The
vector k as feature extraction has interesting properties such
as:
• spectral preservation: (one can calculate spectrum of S[n]
using k.
• normalization: all ki ∈ [−1, 1] which does not require
any further feature normalization.
• Order independence: values of ki are independent of the
choice of p.
• low cost of computations
. One can find a detailed discussion of these properties in [15].
B. Gradient Boosted Tree
Gradient boosted tree (GBT) is an ensemble of decision
trees which trees are trained sequentially and each tree
Figure 2: (1) PMSM. (2) accelerometer sensor (3) Dynamometer (4) Motor
is trained on the region that the previous tree had miss- drive (5) Current sensors.
classification. A good features of ensemble of trees (a forest)
is that each tree can be evaluated fast and all trees in forest
can be run in parallel. That makes GBT a good candidate for
real-time implementation.
III. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
A. Test Setup
An experimental test setup has been developed to survey
generalized roughness bearing faults on a PMSM. As shown in
Fig. 2, the experimental test setup consists of a PMSM coupled
to hysteresis dynamometer. The PMSM is driven through a
field oriented controlled driver to operate motor at different
speed. A hysteresis dynamometer is utilized to apply load
on the PMSM. As shown in Fig. 3, the motor is run at 50
Figure 3: Operating points tested for healthy and faulty conditions.
different operating points including 10 different speeds from
low speed to nominal speed and 5 different loads from no load B. Performance
to full load. An EVALADXL354 board from Analog Devices
The collected data is shuffled into 10 folds and cross-
is used to monitor vibrations. This is a 3 axis MEMS low noise
validation is performed to measure the accuracy of the system.
and low power accelerometer supporting the range of ±2(g) or
In each trial, 9 folds are used for training and the performance
±8(g) [16]. The sensor boards is adjusted at ±2(g) and placed
is measured using the hold-out fold. After repeating the
on the top of the drive end bearing side of the motor. The X
process 10 times the results are averaged and reported in the
and Z axes calculate vertical vibrations and Y-axis is aligned
table I. Here, F0 denotes the fault-free system and F1 , · · · , F5
with the shaft and calculates horizontal vibration.Healthy and
represent different faults. The system has overall accuracy of
faulty bearings tested in this paper are presented in Fig.4.
98.49%. The average F1 score for the classifier is 98.49%.
Bearing 6003 is used to emulate generalized roughness bearing
The algorithms process a window of 256 samples of the
faults. Healthy condition, single point defect on the outer
vibration signal which is sampled at the rate of 50K. The
race, lubrication issues and contamination issues are tested 1
data collection latency for detecting fault is 256 × 50K =
in this paper. In the case of a single point defect point
5.12ms. The latency time is bigger than the processing times
fault a hole is made on the outer race. Lubrication fault has
which enables the algorithm to be implemented in real-time
been emulated for 2 severity on without lubrication and one
on embedded computers.
with poor lubrication. In the case of contamination issue the
bearings are contaminated with rock tumbler grits with sizes
of 60 and 200 grits.
Fig. 5 shows examples X-axis vibration signals for healthy,
and faulty conditions. As shown localized outer race fault
shows a specific pattern which distinguishes it from gener-
alized roughness faults. Moreover, due to distributing faults
among bearing surfaces lubrication and contamination faults
do not show the determined pattern and they are changing over Figure 4: Tested bearings: left to right (1) healthy bearing (2) bearing without
time. lubricant (3) contaminated bearing

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 Table I: Confusion Matrix of GBT
Pred./Actual F0 F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 Precision Recall Accuracy
F0 3804 11 5 6 12 10 98.86% 98.81% 98.80%
F1 15 3779 7 3 16 46 97.75% 98.16% 98.15%
F2 3 4 3816 6 8 8 99.25% 99.12% 99.11%
F3 9 9 5 3813 30 7 98.45% 99.04% 99.03%
F4 11 10 7 19 3850 13 98.47% 98.04% 98.04%
F5 8 37 10 3 11 3766 98.20% 97.82% 97.81%
Average - - - - - - 98.496% 98.498% 98.49%

Table II: Test Setup Specifications

paper.
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