Applying Poincaré Plots for Evaluating the Health State of Aircraft Generators

This paper explores the use of Poincaré plots to study signal variability of Navy P-3 aircraft generators. The method, which was inspired from nonlinear dynamics for analyzing interval sequences, is a technique used to plot each interval against the subsequent interval of the signal from different points of view. The geometry of the plots reveals salient features among new, low-usage, and high-usage generators. In addition to its simple visual interpretation, quantitative descriptors were explored to assess the degree of degradation of the overall system health state. The results suggest that accurate health state predictions can be achieved if baseline data can be collected.