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IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS
Multisensor Wireless System for Eccentricity and
Bearing Fault Detection in Induction Motors
Ehsan Tarkesh Esfahani, Member, IEEE, Shaocheng Wang, and V. Sundararajan
AbstractThis paper presents a stand-alone multisensor wire-
less system for continuous condition monitoring of induction mo-
tors. The proposed wireless system provides a low-cost alter-
native to expensive condition monitoring technology available
through dedicated current signature analysis or vibration moni-
toring equipment. The system employs multiple sensors (acoustic,
vibration, and current) mounted on a common wireless platform.
The faults of interest are static and dynamic air-gap eccentric-
ity, bearing damage, and their combinations. The HilbertHuang
transform of vibration data and power spectral density of current
and acoustic signals are used as the features in a hierarchical clas-
sifier. The proposed wireless system can distinguish a faulty motor
from a healthy motor with a probability of 99.9% of correct de-
tection and less than 0.1% likelihood of false alarm. It can also
discriminate between different fault categories and severity with
an average accuracy of 95%.
Index TermsCondition monitoring, fault diagnosis, Hilbert
Huang transform (HHT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs).
NOMENCLATURE
fs Supplied frequency.
fr Rotational frequency.
fv i , fv o Inner/outer race defected bearing harmonics in
vibration.
fv b Ball defected bearing harmonics in vibration.
fL E , fH E Low/high frequency eccentricity component in
current.
fV E Eccentricity related frequencies in vibration signal.
D Pitch diameter of bearing.
d Ball diameter of bearing.
Bearing contact angle.
n Number of bearings ball.
fcu r Frequency component of bearing damage in cur-
rent.
fc Characteristic vibration frequency (fv i , fv o , and
fv b ).
Manuscript received February 4, 2012; revised October 15, 2012 and
February 13, 2013; accepted April 23, 2013. Recommended by Technical Editor
M. Iwasaki. This work was supported by the California Energy Commission
under Grant 56544 A/09-20 and in part by the DEED scholarship of the Amer-
ican Power Public Association.
E. T. Esfahani was with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Uni-
versity of California Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521 USA. He is now with
the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University at
Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14269 USA (e-mail:
ehsanesf@buffalo.edu).
S. Wang and V. Sundararajan are with the Department of Mechanical Engi-
neering, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521 USA (e-mail:
swang029@ucr.edu; vsundar@engr.ucr.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMECH.2013.2260865
1083-4435/$31.00 2013 IEEE
1
R Number of rotor bars.
P Number of pole pairs.
nd Eccentricity order.
Stator time harmonic (1, 3, 5).
s Slip.
(t), (t) Instantaneous amplitude/frequency of IMFs.
H{.} Hilbert transform.
X, X Original feature set, normalized feature set.
I. INTRODUCTION
NDUCTION motors are widely used in a variety of indus-
I trial applications and consume a significant portion of en-
ergy [1]. Environmental stress and load conditions applied to
these motors can cause a malfunction or reduce the efficiency of
the motors leading to repair expenses and financial loss due to
unexpected downtime. Therefore, to increase the productivity
of the plant and to reduce maintenance costs of these systems,
reliable condition monitoring and diagnosis is often desired.
The primary problems in induction motors are: 1) air-gap
eccentricity; 2) rotor bar damage; 3) bearing damage; and
4) stator winding imbalance [2]. These problems are often nei-
ther sudden nor independent. Therefore, by using the progres-
sive nature of these problems, a continuous monitoring system
can track the faults as they develop and help identify the root
cause of faults and prevent the consequent failures.
There has been substantial amount of research into detection
of these faults. Most work focuses on motor current signature
analysis because the method is noninvasive, convenient, and
can yield information on a variety of faults [3]. In addition,
vibrations [4] and acoustic emissions [5], [6] have also been
used for condition monitoring.
Classical spectral analysis (such as fast Fourier transform) of
stator current is commonly used for detection of single or com-
bination of multiple faults in steady-state conditions [7]. Ad-
ditionally, to consider the nonstationary behavior and transient
effects in induction motors, a variety of timefrequency analy-
sis, such as wavelet transforms [8][12], HilbertHuang trans-
form [12][14] in combination with different blind source sep-
aration methods such as empirical mode decomposition (EMD)
[14], [15] and independent component analysis [16], [17], are
used. A complete review of invasive and noninvasive detection
methods of faults in stator, rotor, bearings, and those related to
eccentricity can be found in [18] and [19].
In addition, various machine learning and statistical meth-
ods such as support vector machine (SVM) [17], [20], neural
networks [21], genetic algorithms [22], and fuzzy logic are de-
veloped to increase the accuracy of fault detection.
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2 IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS
The state of the art in condition monitoring of induction motor
uses wired sensors, usually of a single modality, to track faults,
which is mostly done offline. The installation and maintenance
of these sensors usually increase the motor downtime and cost
more than the sensors themselves.
Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are becoming a more fea-
sible monitoring option because they are small and lightweight,
and hence, can be placed in limited spaces. They can be mounted
on moving parts, thus, eliminating the need for flexible connec-
tors, slip rings, etc.
Recently, WSN have been developed for motor condition
monitoring [4], [23][26]. However, most of these works aimed
to detect motor failure rather than the root of fault. For instance,
Lima-Filho et al. [25] developed an embedded WSN, which
determine the motor efficiency through local computation on
WSN and transmit the conditioned signal to the base node.
In general, the main challenge in developing WSN for con-
dition monitoring is data loss, which is intrinsic to wireless
communication systems. Despite, the new advances in wireless
communication and data imputation, data delivery rate is still
imperfect in harsh industrial environment. Therefore, it is es-
sential to have a robust detection algorithm which can rely on
a fewer number of information packet and is also computation-
ally inexpensive [26]. In the latter case, the classified data are
transmitted instead of whole stream of measured data.
In this paper, a multisensor fusion framework is implemented
on a wireless sensor node to detect multiple motor malfunc-
tion. This paper emphasizes detailed diagnosis of the causes of
the fault condition due to various bearing failure and air-gap
eccentricity. Detection of progress of fault is also studied by
considering the simultaneous faults.
The main focus of the paper is to present a computationally
inexpensive method which can detect the presence and type of
malfunction in induction motors. The rest of the paper is orga-
nized as follows: Section II provides background information on
bearing and air-gap fault detections. Materials, methods, and ex-
perimental studies are described in Section III. Data analysis, in-
cluding feature generation/selection, is described in Section IV.
Section V described the classification method used in this study.
Finally Section VI present and discuss the experimental results.
II. BACKGROUND ON FAULT DETECTION
This paper considers motor malfunctions due to various bear-
ing damages and air-gap eccentricity. This section reviews the
detection methods of each of these two faults.
A. Bearing Fault Detection
Bearing failures are the most common failures in induction
motors [2]. The major causes of failures are: damages on inner or
outer races of the bearing due to thermal or dynamic mechanical
stresses. Misalignment and poor bearing fitting can also damage
the bearing cage. The other source of bearing fault is lack of
lubricant due to thermal or electrical stresses.
Various types of sensors and condition-monitoring methods
have been developed for monitoring the bearing conditions. The
most common method is to use vibration sensors to monitor the
vibration of the bearings [20], [27][29].
Widodo et al. used a low-speed bearing test rig to stimulate
different bearing faults [20]. They used acoustic emission and
vibration signals to train a SVM. Frosini and Bassi extended
the bearing fault conditions to corrosion in bearings. They used
stator current and efficiency of the induction motor for fault
detection purposes [27]. Zhang et al. extracted entropy related
features from vibration data [28]. They used a multiscale en-
tropy method, which in comparison to regular entropy methods,
provides additional information on nonlinear dynamics of the
rotating components and coupling effects between these compo-
nents. Onel and Benbouzid used Park and Concordia transform
to detect bearing related failures [29].
Most of these bearing fault analyses are based on the single
point defects on the bearing, which occur at a relatively severe
stage of bearing failure. Based on its location, a single point
defect can lead to a specific vibration frequency as follows [30]:
nfr (D d cos )
fv o = (1)
2D
nfr (D + d cos )
fv i = (2)
2D
  2 
D d
fv b = 1 cos fr . (3)
d D
Another method of detecting bearing faults can be obtained
by noting that bearing vibration typically leads to variations in
the motor torque which is related to the current drawn by the
motor. Thus, the current harmonics at the specific frequencies
will be affected by bearing vibration. The current spectrum can
also be used to detect bearing failures as follows:
fcurrent = fs kfc . (4)
The current spectrum includes information from other motor
malfunctions such as load oscillation, broken rotor bar, and
rotor eccentricity. These extraneous sources can be removed by
different methods such as Wiener filter-based noise cancellation
[31] and statistical approaches [32].
B. Air-gap Eccentricity
Air-gap eccentricity is a condition in which there is an uneven
air gap between the stator and the rotor. Air-gap eccentricity un-
balances the magnetic pull and causes vibration, acoustic noise,
bearing wear, and rotor deflection. Consequently, eccentricity
may lead to severe damage to the stator and rotor core. Thus,
it is critical to detect the air-gap eccentricity at an early stage
to protect the motor system. Static eccentricity is either caused
by the ovality of stator core or incorrect positioning of stator
core and/ or bearing. In static eccentricity, the position of mini-
mum air-gap is fixed [33]. High level of static eccentricity may
lead to dynamic eccentricity where the center of the rotor is
not at the center of rotation, and the position of the minimum
air-gap rotates with the rotor. Air-gap eccentricity induces sta-
tor current harmonics at specific high and low frequencies [33].
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ESFAHANI et al.: MULTISENSOR WIRELESS SYSTEM FOR ECCENTRICITY AND BEARING FAULT DETECTION IN INDUCTION MOTORS
Fig. 1. (a) Damaged bearings. (b) Bearings replacements for eccentricity.
High-frequency components of interest can be described by
(1 s)
fH E = (kR nd )fs
p causes an uneven air-gap length between the rotor and the stator
where k is an integer and nd = 0 for static eccentricity and nd =
1, 2, or 3 for dynamic cases [18]. Furthermore, if both static and
dynamic eccentricities exist together, the case in most air-gap
related failures, there will be low-frequency components near
the fundamental frequency, which can be expressed by
fL E = fs kfr .
In case of mixed eccentricity, low-frequency component can
also be detected in the stator vibration signal [18]
fV E = 2fs fr .
Different features such as instantaneous reactive power [34]
have been introduced to detect the air-gap related problems in
motor current signature analysis. However, load oscillation can
also lead to current harmonics at frequencies described by (5)
and (6), which cause a major challenge in using current signal
for eccentricity detection.
To eliminate the load effects from eccentricity detection, dif-
ferent methods such as signal injection-based method [35] and
monitoring both current and voltage harmonic [36] have been
proposed. Additionally, Antonino and Pons-Llinares proposed
the analysis of startup current to detect eccentricity [8]. How-
ever, these methods are limited, as they cannot provide contin-
uous protection.
III. MATERIALS AND METHODS
A. Experimental Conditions
The faults of interest in this paper are air-gap eccentricity and
bearing failure. Experiments are conducted under 18 different
conditions, which are grouped as four categories:
1) Faulty bearings (with four levels: bearing with no grease,
bearing with damages on inner race, outer race and cage);
2) Air-gap eccentricity condition (four levels of static air-gap
eccentricity and 6 levels of dynamic air-gap eccentricity);
3) Simultaneous bearing and eccentricity faults (three
levels);
4) Normal condition.
Faulty bearing conditions are studied by replacing one of the
motors bearings by a damaged one. Also, two different sets of
damaged bearings [see Fig. 1(a)] are used to test the dependency
of the results on the location of bearing defect.
3
Fig. 2. Eccentricity (a) axis of rotation (AOR) is translated (b) tilted AOR.
The effects of air-gap eccentricity are studied by replacing
one or both of the bearings in the motor housing by modi-
fied bushings shown in Fig. 1(b). In this figure, bearings with
off-centered outer bushing cause static eccentricity. The offset
(5)
as shown in Fig. 2. Different values of offsets create different
air-gap lengths. Moreover, replacing the bearings can be done
in two different ways: keeping the thicker part of both bushes in
the same direction or in opposite directions. The rotors axes of
rotation will be more translated and less tilted when the thicker
parts of the bearings are in the same direction and vice versa for
(6) the opposite direction as shown in Fig. 2.
Ten conditions of air-gap eccentricity (both static and dy-
namic) are chosen from the various ways to combine the offset
bearings [see Fig. 1(b)] in the motor assembly. The different
(7) configurations make various air-gap eccentricities ranging from
10% to 35%.
Furthermore, to detect motor malfunctions progress, we con-
sidered the case that both faults (bearing damage and eccen-
tricity) co-exist. In practice, severe bearing damage can cause
air-gap eccentricity, therefore; detection of simultaneous faults
can be a valid determination of fault progress.
The experiment is block randomized with 40 trials for the
normal condition, 20 trials for each faulty bearing, 20 trial for
each double fault, and 10 trials of each air-gap and conditions.
This means that one of the conditions is randomly selected and
the experiments are conducted in ten trials. Upon completing
all the ten trials, another condition is selected randomly again
and the whole procedure is repeated. In each trial, the data are
recorded in 2 min time spans. The first and the last 10 s of the
data are deleted to eliminate transitional effects. The remaining
signal is then cut to 4 s segments. This process extracts 25
segments (data points) form each trial.
The recorded data can be summarized as follows:
1) normal condition (one level)40 trials (1000 segments);
2) air-gap eccentricity (ten levels)100 trials (2500
segments);
3) faulty bearing (four levels)120 trials (3000 segments);
4) double faults (three levels)60 trials (1500 segments).
B. Experimental Setup
The motors used in the experiment are 1.5 hp six-pole three-
phase induction motors rated at 230 V line voltage and 4.8 A line
current. They are connected to a PWM adjustable speed drive
to control the speed. The running speed of the motors with no
load is 1200 r/min (20 Hz). To apply load, the induction motor
drives a dc generator through a pulley mechanism. Four power
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4 IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS

Fig. 3. Experimental setup. Fig. 4. IMFs of vibration signal in (a) time domain and (b) frequency domain.

pecially useful for nonstationary signals [39]. Unlike FFT, it

resistors are connected in series to load the dc generator. This
combination applies approximately 333 W load and causes the
slip of 0.0136.
Finally, the experiment is conducted using two identical mo-
tors to remove effects related to the variability in the motors and
also to validate the robustness of the classification algorithm.
One of the motors is only used to record normal conditions
while the other one is used in both normal and faulty condi-
tions. The experimental setup is shown in Fig. 3.
For data acquisition, a two-axis accelerometer, a microphone,
and a Hall-effect sensor are used to record vibration in x-, z-
axis (see Fig. 3), sound and current, respectively. The acoustic
signal is first passed through a high-pass filter to remove dc
components and is then amplified. To avoid aliasing, a low-pass
filter is used before the signal goes to the ADC. All the data are
recorded at a sampling rate of 256 Hz.
To develop a wireless sensor network, Imote2 sensor nodes
are used [37]. Imote2 is a modular platform and can be stacked
with sensor boards to customize the system to a specific applica-
tion. The Imote2 consists of an Intel PXA271 XScale processor
combined with 32 MB of on-board Flash storage and 32 MB
of SRAM. Its radio chip supports a 250 kb/s data rate with 16
channels in the 2.4 GHz band. The integrated antenna enables
the sensor mote to provide a nominal range of about 30 m.
Data loss is intrinsic to wireless communication systems.
Therefore, a reliable protocol system is needed to deliver pack-
ets of data between sensor nodes and the base station. For this
purpose, Berkeley media access control (B-MAC) [38] proto-
col is used. B-MAC is a reconfigurable carrier senses multiple
access protocol that achieves low power processing, collision
avoidance, and high channel utilization. The B-MAC contains
a clear channel assessment, to determine if the channel is clear
for collision avoidance, and packet back off, link layer acknowl-
edgement, and low power listening.
The sensor continuously collects and buffers data for 4 s.
When the buffer is full, the stored data are transmitted from the
sensor node to the receiver in the form of packets. When all the
provides information in joint time and frequency domains.
A. HilbertHuang Transform
HHT adaptively tracks the evolution of the timefrequency in
the original signal and provides detailed information at arbitrary
timefrequency scales. HHT is computed in two steps: 1) EMD
and 2) Hilbert spectral analysis.
HHT uses the EMD to decompose a signal into a finite set
of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), and then uses the Hilbert
transform of the IMFs to obtain instantaneous frequency and
amplitude data. Using the EMD method, a time series signal
x(t) is represented as a sum of n IMFs ui (t) and a residue r.
Fig. 4 illustrates the IMF extracted from vibration signal and
their power spectral density in descending order. IMF1 is as-
sociated with the locally highest frequency and IMF3 with the
lowest frequency.
Having obtained the IMFs using EMD method, Hilbert trans-
form is applied to each IMF. Instantaneous amplitude i (t) and
frequency i (t) are then calculated via the following equations:

i (t) = u2i (t) + H{ui (t)}2 (8)
 
d H{ui (t)}
i (t) = tan1 . (9)
dt ui (t)
The frequencytime distribution of the amplitude over differ-
ent IMFs is designated as the Hilbert spectrum H(, t). Finally,
the marginal spectrum is computed as follows:
 T
h() = H(, t)dt. (10)
0
Using the Hilbert marginal spectrum (HMS), we calculate the
instantaneous power of nine different frequencies bands in the
first two IMF along with the average amplitude of the first two
IMF for each signal as our features. The average instantaneous
amplitude can be expressed as follows:


N
packets are sent out, the sensor node starts to collect data again. i = i (n) /N . (11)
n =1

IV. DATA ANALYSIS B. Feature Extraction

The signals from all four channels are analyzed using two The relevant features that carry the fault information depend
methods: 1) The HilbertHuang ransform (HHT); and 2) fast upon the combination of sensor and signal processing algo-
Fourier transform (FFT). The HHT has been shown to be es- rithms. To extract the fault information, the feature extraction
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ESFAHANI et al.: MULTISENSOR WIRELESS SYSTEM FOR ECCENTRICITY AND BEARING FAULT DETECTION IN INDUCTION MOTORS
TABLE I
LIST OF FEATURES EXTRACTED FROM EACH SENSOR
method is based on fault characteristic frequencies of the motor
(fv o , fv i , fv b ) and the low characteristic frequencies of air-gap
eccentricity (fL E ). The high-frequency components related to
air-gap eccentricity ( kHz) require sensors with high sampling
rates and an undesirable increase of computational complex-
ity. Therefore, only low-frequency components near the sup-
plied frequency (fs = 60 Hz) are used in the feature extraction
method.
The bearing used in the experiment is SKF bearing of series
6206, a deep grove ball bearing containing nine balls. The con-
tact angle is 0 . The ball diameter is 9.525 mm and the pitch
diameter is 46 mm. Using (1)-(2), the inner/outer race fault
characteristic frequencies in vibration signal are determined as
108.63 and 71.36 Hz, respectively. The ball spin frequency is
46.22 Hz in vibration (3) and 13.78 Hz in current signals (4).
Also the eccentricity related frequencies of interest are deter-
mined via (6)-(7) as 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100 Hz.
A frequency band centered at each of the nine frequencies
of interest, with a width of 2 Hz is used to calculate the power
spectral density from the FFT analysis. Power spectral density
of each frequency band is then normalized with respect to the
power of the whole signal to form the first set of features.
HMS of the first extracted IMF is also calculated using the
same frequency bands. Due to lack of high-frequency compo-
nents in the second IMF, only the Hilbert marginal spectrum
at 20 and 40 Hz are calculated in the second IMF. Finally the
averaged instantaneous amplitudes of the first two IMFs are se-
lected as the last set of features. Table I lists all the features that
are generated from each sensor based on the fault characteristic
frequencies.
As Table I illustrates, there are 23 features extracted from each
sensor. This forms a feature vector of size 92 for each segment
of data. After extracting the features, they are normalized with
respect to the grand mean (X) and standard deviations (X ) as
shown in (12), whereXand Xare original raw and normalized
features
X = (X X)/X . (12)
Furthermore, in order to reduce the computational complex-
ity as well as the number of free parameters in the classifier, it is
necessary to find the best subset of features that has minimum
mutual information and maximum class discriminatory infor-
mation. To do so, a sequential forward search (SFS) is used for
feature selection.
Starting from an empty feature set, SFS creates candidate fea-
ture subsets by sequentially adding each of the features not yet
selected. For each candidate feature subset, tenfold cross val-
idation is performed by repeatedly checking the performance
of a Fishers linear classifier (LDA) in separating the data of
5
Fig. 5. Principal components of HHT and FFT features separating the normal
condition from faulty conditions data.
normal conditions from the faulty ones. Feature selection con-
tinues until there is no significant improvement in performance
of LDA.
Using the SFS method, a subset of eight features (out of
92 features) is determined as the best feature set. To further
reduce the dimension of the features and to minimize mutual
information, principal component analysis (PCA) is used to de-
correlate the extracted features. Principal component identifies
the main directions in the feature space where the data are
distributed. Fig. 5 illustrates the first two components of all the
data with different conditions.
It can be seen in Fig. 5 that just by using the first two PCAs,
the normal condition can be easily separated from air-gap and
faulty bearings (inner/outer scratched, cage damaged, and no
lubricant conditions). Therefore, the first two PCA are used for
the primary fault detection.
In Fig. 5, the two datasets labeled as Bearing 1 and Bear-
ing 2 are both bearing related faults that are collected with
two different sets of faulty bearings. Both sets consist of bear-
ings with inner/outer and side damage, but location of bearing
defect is different. To test the robustness of features, we only
used one set of faulty bearing data (Bearing 1) for feature ex-
traction/selection purposes. After determining the PCA of the
most prominent features, we map the second set (Bearing 2) into
feature space. It can be seen in Fig. 5 that although the location
of bearing defect is changed, new data points still fall into the
same cluster. This clearly shows the robustness of feature ex-
traction/selection for distinguishing between normal and faulty
bearing.
It should also be noted that in Fig. 5, the feature space is
selected for separation of normal condition from faulty one.
It can be seen in Fig. 5 that in case of simultaneous faults
(bearing damage and eccentricity), double fault conditions
overlap with bearing fault. This is mainly due to the use of
low-frequency components for detecting the eccentricity. Since
power of eccentricity-related low-frequency components (fL E )
is considerably smaller than amplitude of bearing characteristic
frequencies, bearing faults appear as the dominant fault.
Furthermore, similar feature extraction scheme is used to
determine the subcategory of eccentricity and bearing fault. The
feature selection scheme for faulty bearing condition is based
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6 IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS
Fig. 6. Separating subclasses of bearing damages.
Fig. 7. LDA classifier for separating static and dynamic eccentricity.
on the LDA performance in distinguishing between lubricant
problem and any other bearings faults. Using the SFS method,
PSD of z-vibration data at 71.36 Hz and average power envelope
of first IMF of sound and z-vibration data are the best subset for
bearings fault (see Fig. 6).
As shown in Fig. 6, instantaneous power of sound and vibra-
tion are the best features in separating the double fault conditions
from single bearing faults.
In eccentricity-related faults, the goal of feature selection is
to maximize the distance between dynamic and static eccentric-
ities. SFD method selects the average power envelope of first
IMF of vibration and PSD of vibration at 80 Hz as the best
features. Fig. 7 illustrates the distribution of the dynamic and
static eccentricity in the related feature space.
V. CLASSIFICATION
Based on the separability properties of the data, a two-stage
classification is used to detect the motor fault and its type. Fig. 8
illustrates the complete classification process.
As shown in Fig. 8, the extracted features are first classified by
a QDA classifier. The aim of this classifier is to project the data
into a new hyper-axis such that the projected data have the max-
imum distance between classes and minimum distance within
classes. It uses a hyper-quadratic surface to separate the normal
condition class from faulty conditions. This technique has a very
low computational requirement, which makes it suitable for fast
fault detection and implementation on wireless nodes.
Additionally, if the data are classified as bearing fault or ec-
centricity, a SVM with radial basis function as the kernel is used
Fig. 8. Classification algorithm.
Fig. 9. Multiclass LDA for primary fault detection (dashed line) and multi-
class QDA for primary fault detection (solid contour line).
as a secondary classification to detect the fault sub-category.
Since bearing faults include five categories (Inner/outer dam-
age, side damage, lubricant and double faults) a structured SVM
is used to separate the data. The structured SVM includes 5 one-
versus-all classifiers and chooses the class that classifies the test
datum with greatest margin. It should be noted that different
feature vectors are used in primary and secondary classifiers.
VI. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
To train the primary classifier, ten percent of normal con-
ditions (recorded at two identical motors) and ten percent of
single and double fault conditions are used. The remaining of
the dataset is used to evaluate the performance of the classifier.
A multiclass linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and quadratic
discriminant analysis (QDA) are used for the primary classifica-
tion. The results of these two classifiers are shown in Fig. 9. The
white area in Fig. 9 is the area classified as the normal condition.
Also, the black and gray areas represent the feature subspace
associated with eccentricity and bearing fault respectively. The
boundary of the classes is represented by white dashed lines in
LDA and solid contours in QDA.
It can be seen that LDA misclassified some of the outliers be-
cause there was a larger within-class variance in fault conditions
than in normal condition. In fact, both bearing and eccentricity
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ESFAHANI et al.: MULTISENSOR WIRELESS SYSTEM FOR ECCENTRICITY AND BEARING FAULT DETECTION IN INDUCTION MOTORS
TABLE II
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR PRIMARY CLASSIFICATION (FAULTY DETECTION)
TABLE III
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR SECONDARY CLASSIFICATION (FAULT TYPE)
TABLE IV
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR SECONDARY CLASSIFICATION (FAULT TYPE)
faults consist of several subclasses. Because of the differences
in the nature of these subcategories, the within-class variance
of fault condition is larger than normal condition. This makes
the decision surface in LDA less sensitive to faulty conditions.
Therefore, the rate of missing faulty conditions will increase.
However; QDA solves this problem by using contour as the
decision surface.
The proposed approach can correctly detect almost all faulty
conditions from normal conditions (>99% accuracy). It should
be noted that at this stage double fault conditions (bearing and
eccentricity) are classified as bearing faults.
Table II summarizes the average classification rate of the pri-
mary classifier in 100 different cross evaluations. Numbers in
the parenthesis are the standard deviation. Rows are the true
class and columns are the classification results. It can be seen
from Table II that almost all the normal conditions are cor-
rectly classified. The rate of false alarm in fault detection is less
than 0.1%. By increasing the number of training data to 20%,
the false alarm decays to zero. Also, it can be seen that most
misclassifications are in bearing faults (around 1%), which are
misclassified as eccentricity.
In the primary classification, SFS identified eight features as
the best subset of features for fault detections. Among them, the
following components have the highest weight in the first two
principal components: HMS of the vibration signal (at 46 and
71 Hz of the first IMF) and certain key frequencies of the PSD
of the current and sound data (40 and 20 Hz for sound, 60 Hz
for current). Upon the detection of the fault type, the second
classifier determines the subcategory of the detected fault. Again
10% of the faulty conditions data are used for training and
remaining are used for testing in a 10-fold cross validation. The
average classification rate over 100 evaluations is presented in
Table III for bearing fault and in Table IV for eccentricity. The
7
numbers in the parenthesis are the standard deviation. Rows are
the real class and columns are the classification result.
It can be seen in Table III, that almost all the lubricant prob-
lems have been classified correctly. This is not surprising as the
feature set selected for this classifier is based on the separability
of this kind of fault (lack of lubricant) from the other types.
Fig. 6 shows that inner race and outer race scratched cases are
almost in two separate clusters. This explains their high ac-
curacy rate (95.7% and 88.4%, respectively). Furthermore, the
damage on the bearings cage has the lowest classification rate.
It is mostly confused with inner race damage. This is mostly
because of the distribution of this fault (see Fig. 6), which forms
two main clusters. The larger cluster is well separated from the
other faults while the second one (which is smaller in size and
larger in variance) is projected on the outer race condition. It
can also be interpreted from Table III, that cage damage, is the
only condition with which all other bearing faults are confused,
probably because the procedure for changing the bearings in
different experimental setups can damage the cage.
Finally, the confusion matrix for the last category of motor
malfunction, eccentricity, is illustrated in Table IV.
Table IV shows that the LDA classifier can achieve high accu-
racy in static and dynamic eccentricity (97% and 89% respec-
tively). Moreover, Fig. 7 illustrates the classification of feature
space with only considering two vibration-based features: PSD
at 80 Hz and average power of the first IMF.
It can be seen that static and dynamic eccentricities have dis-
tinguishable mean values but large standard deviations, which
eventually cause confusion in the classification. This is possibly
because we excluded the high-frequency components from the
feature space to reduce the computational demand.
VII. CONCLUSION
The proposed research develops an inexpensive multisensor
wireless sensor system to perform real-time condition monitor-
ing of induction motors. The use of multiple sensor modalities
reduces the need for precise instrumentation and signal process-
ing as information from several sources are extracted.
The results showed that a combination of the IMFs of the
HHT of the vibration signal and certain key frequencies of the
FFT of the current and sound data yield the highest accuracy.
The proposed wireless system can distinguish a faulty motor
from a healthy motor with a probability of 99.9% with less than
0.1% likelihood of false alarm. It can also discriminate between
different fault categories and severity with in a high accuracy.
Bearing and eccentricity fault can be detected with 99.9% ac-
curacy. Within bearing fault, the lack of lubricant in bearing
and damage on inner race and outer race of the bearing can
be detected with an average accuracy of 95%. The accuracy
of faulty bearing with side damage is relatively low (60%).
However, as long as bearing fault is not misclassified as normal
or eccentricity, the confusion between bearing with Inner/outer
and side damage is not, practically speaking, an issue because,
in any case of bearing damage, the bearing needs to be replaced.
It should be noted the extracted features for both eccentricity
and bearing failure are a function of rotational frequency. In our
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

8 IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS

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 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
ESFAHANI et al.: MULTISENSOR WIRELESS SYSTEM FOR ECCENTRICITY AND BEARING FAULT DETECTION IN INDUCTION MOTORS
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Ehsan T. Esfahani (M06) received the M.S. de-
gree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in
mechanical engineering from the University of Cali-
fornia Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA, in 2012.
He is currently an Assistant Professor in the De-
partment of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering,
University at Buffalo, The State University of New
York, Buffalo, NY, USA. His main research interests
include design of intelligent systems.
9
Shaocheng Wang received the M.S. degree in me-
chanical engineering from the University of Califor-
nia Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA, in 2012, where
he is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in
mechanical engineering.
His main research interests include fault detection
and cyber security in large-scale control systems.
V. Sundararajan received the M.S. and Ph.D. de-
grees in mechanical engineering from the University
of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA, in 1997
and 2000, respectively.
He is currently an Assistant Professor in the De-
partment of Mechanical Engineering, University of
California Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA. His main
research interests include intelligent design and man-
ufacturing processes.