The paper describes a procedure for automatic selection of symptoms accompanying the break in the synchronous motor armature winding coils. This procedure, called the feature selection, leads to choosing from a full set of features describing the problem, such a subset that would allow the best distinguishing between healthy and damaged states. As the features the spectra components amplitudes of the motor current signals were used. The full spectra of current signals are considered as the multidimensional feature spaces and their subspaces are tested. Particular subspaces are chosen with the aid of genetic algorithm and their goodness is tested using Mahalanobis distance measure. The algorithm searches for such a subspaces for which this distance is the greatest. The algorithm is very efficient and, as it was confirmed by research, leads to good results. The proposed technique is successfully applied in many other fields of science and technology, including medical diagnostics.
