Nowadays, manufacturing companies are making great efforts to implement an effective machinery maintenance program, which provides incipient fault detection. The machine problem and its irregularity can be detected at an early stage by employing a suitable condition monitoring accompanied with powerful signal processing technique. Among various defects occurred in machines, rotor faults are of significant importance as they cause secondary failures that lead to a serious motor malfunction. Diagnosis of rotor failures has long been an important but complicated task in the area of motor faults detection. This paper intends to review and summarize the recent researches and developments performed in condition monitoring of the induction machine with the purpose of rotor faults detection. The aim of this article is to provide a broad outlook on rotor fault monitoring techniques for the researchers and engineers.

Abstract-This paper proposes a new approach to diagnose broken rotor bar failure in a line start-permanent magnet synchronous motor (LS-PMSM) using random forests. The transient current signal during the motor startup was acquired from a healthy motor and a faulty motor with a broken rotor bar fault. We extracted 13 statistical time domain features from the startup transient current signal, and used these features to train and test a random forest to determine whether the motor was operating under normal or faulty conditions. For feature selection, we used the feature importances from the random forest to reduce the number of features to two features. The results showed that the random forest classifies the motor condition as healthy or faulty with an accuracy of 98.8% using all features and with an accuracy of 98.4% by using only the mean-index and impulsion features. The performance of the random forest was compared with a decision tree, Naïve Bayes classifier, logistic regression, linear ridge, and a support vector machine, with the random forest consistently having a higher accuracy than the other algorithms. The proposed approach can be used in industry for online monitoring and fault diagnostic of LS-PMSM motors and the results can be helpful for the establishment of preventive maintenance plans in factories.

Among palm oil millers, the ripeness of oil palm Fresh Fruit Bunch (FFB) is determined through visual inspection. To increase the productivity of the millers, many researchers have proposed with a new detection method to replace the conventional one. The sensitivity of such a sensor plays a crucial role in determining the effectiveness of the method. In our preliminary study a novel oil palm fruit sensor to detect the maturity of oil palm fruit bunches is proposed. The design of the proposed air coil sensor based on an inductive sensor is further investigated to improve its sensitivity. This paper investigates the results pertaining to the effects of the air coil structure of an oil palm fruit sensor, taking consideration of the used copper wire diameter ranging from 0.10 mm to 0.18 mm with 60 turns. The flat-type shape of air coil was used on twenty samples of fruitlets from two categories, namely ripe and unripe. Samples are tested with frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 120 MHz. The sensitivity of the sensor between air to fruitlet samples increases as the coil diameter increases. As for the sensitivity differences between ripe and unripe samples, the 5 mm air coil length with the 0.12 mm coil diameter provides the highest percentage difference between samples and it is amongst the highest deviation value between samples. The result from this study is important to improve the sensitivity of the inductive oil palm fruit sensor mainly with regards to the design of the air coil structure. The efficiency of the sensor to determine the maturity of the oil palm FFB and the ripening process of the fruitlet could further be enhanced.

This paper is dedicated to investigating static eccentricity in a three-phase LSPMSM. The modeling of LSPMSM with static eccentricity between stator and rotor is developed using finite element method (FEM). The analytical expression for the permeance and flux components of nonuniform air-gap due to static eccentricity fault is discussed. Various indexes for static eccentricity detection using stator current signal of IM and permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) are presented. Since LSPMSM is composed of a rotor which is a combination of these two motors, the ability of these features is evaluated for static eccentricity diagnosis in LSPMSM. The simulated stator current signal of LSPMSM in the presence of static eccentricity is analyzed in frequency domain using power spectral density (PSD). It is demonstrated that static eccentricity fault generates a series of low frequency harmonic components in the form of sidebands around the fundamental frequency. Moreover, the amplitudes of these components increase in proportion to the fault severity. According to the mentioned observations, an accurate frequency pattern is specified for static eccentricity detection in three-phase LSPMSM.

Abstract-The comparative evaluation based on the power speed density of several types of portable Permanent Magnet Generator (PMG) considered for agricultural applications is presented. These generators are purposely designed to be used in agriculture sectors and thereby it should be of lightweight, small in size and ease to use. Six different generator topologies are developed for investigation of such purposes. A number of design parameters are considered to analyze the performance characteristics for each type of developed PMG. Based on the power speed density factor that is used to describe better generator performance, the suitable PMG for the agricultural application is identified through a comprehensive evaluation.

This paper discussed on the design and analysis of a permanent magnet generator (PMG). Basically, the PMG is a slot-less type topology and operated in a single-phase. The flux direction in the air gap is in radial. It was developed for energizing the linear motor in pruner application. Due to this application, a compact generator that can produce 500W output power is required since the overall size of the PMG is important. Permeance Analysis Method (PAM) and Finite Element Method (FEM) were used to analyzed the PMG performance characteristic in addition of measurement of the PMG prototype. Various numbers of poles and rotor size were considered during this analysis. The results show that the slot-less PMG with stator size of 104 mm will produce maximum power of 650 W when it has 6-poles with rotor radius is 37 mm. Based on the results, the calculation method using PAM shows good agreement with measurement and simulation.

From the Malaysian harvester's perspective, the determination of the ripeness of the oil palm (FFB) is a critical factor to maximize palm oil production. A preliminary study of a novel oil palm fruit sensor to detect the maturity of oil palm fruit bunches is presented. To optimize the functionality of the sensor, the frequency characteristics of air coils of various diameters are investigated to determine their inductance and resonant characteristics. Sixteen samples from two categories, namely ripe oil palm fruitlets and unripe oil palm fruitlets, are tested from 100 Hz up to 100 MHz frequency. The results showed the inductance and resonant characteristics of the air coil sensors display significant changes among the samples of each category. The investigations on the frequency characteristics of the sensor air coils are studied to observe the effect of variations in the coil diameter. The effect of coil diameter yields a significant 0.02643 MHz difference between unripe samples to air and 0.01084 MHz for ripe samples to air. The designed sensor exhibits significant potential in determining the maturity of oil palm fruits.

With their highly robust nature and simple design, switched reluctance machines are finding their way into numerous modern day applications. However, they produce oscillatory torque that generates torque ripple and mechanical vibrations. A double rotor structure to maximize the flux linkage and thereby increase the torque generating capability is proposed. As the machine operates close to saturation, the torque computation depends heavily on the energy conversion as the rotor rolls over the stator for a fixed pole pitch. The flux linkage characteristics are highly non-linear, hence estimation of the magnetic and mechanical parameters is extremely cumbersome. Magnetic circuit analysis by interpretation of the number of flux tubes using integration techniques at different positions of the machine to develop the flux linkage characteristics of the double rotor structure is presented. Computation of the inductances during the movement of rotor from unaligned to aligned is crucial in determining the generated torque. Relevant equations of calculations for inductance and flux linkages in the aligned, partially aligned and unaligned positions are computed. The partially aligned computation is based on the average on two intermediate positions, namely the 1/4th aligned and 3/4th aligned conditions. The static torque characteristics based on the energy conversion principles are used to compute the torque value. Results from simulation and experiments used for performance evaluation of the proposed flux tube analysis for computation of the electro-magnetic torque are presented. OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2012, 5 4009