Detection of Induction Motor Faults: A Comparison of Stator Current, Vibration and Acoustic Methods

Abstract

In this paper we present the comparison results of induction motor fault detection using stator current, vibration, and acoustic methods. A broken rotor bar fault and a combination of bearing faults (inner race, outer race, and rolling element faults) were induced into variable speed three-phase induction motors. Both healthy and faulty signatures were acquired under different speed and load conditions. To address the detection capabilities of the above methods, comparisons are made in both the time and joint time-frequency domains. In the frequency domain, spectral differences are compared and characterized under constant speed conditions. To evaluate the detection sensitivities under non-stationary conditions (e.g. startup), a joint timefrequency method called the smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (SPWVD) is employed to analyze non-stationary signatures. The SPWVD is a powerful technique for revealing non-stationary characteristics of motor signatures. Experimental results show that the stator current method is sensitive to the broken rotor bar fault while the vibration method is sensitive to bearing faults. The acoustic method is very attractive in that it contains less noise and interference within the analyzing frequency band. With the proper selection of monitoring and analysis methods, induction motor faults can be detected accurately under both stationary and non-stationary states.

Vibration monitoring for wound rotor induction machine winding fault detection

“…Vibration and torque signal analysis for electrical fault detection has received significantly less attention in available literature due to claimed lower sensitivity, but was however shown to be feasible [8,9]. Consequently a number of authors have recently investigated WRIG winding fault detection and the reported findings demonstrate that winding fault specific spectral changes can be identified in WRIG currents [10][11][12][13].…”

Accelerating 2D Fault Diagnosis of an Induction Motor using a Graphics Processing Unit

“…In general, fault diagnosis of an induction motor is performed by analyzing current, voltage, vibration, acoustic emission (AE), and thermal signals [2,3]. Especially, current and voltage signals have been widely used to classify abnormalities of the induction motor due to their easy signal measurement and their low cost to monitor.…”

Investigation on the Diagnosis of Simple and Combines Mechanical Faults in Asynchronous Motor Based Electric Drives

“…The monitoring of electrical drives has interested many researchers so far (Sethom and Ghedamsi, 2012;Li and Meshefske, 2006;Bindus and Vinod, 2014;Pandey et al, 2012). As provided in Thorsen and Dalva (1995), Bonnett and Yung (2008), Thorsen and Dalva (1998), the repartition of many older publications on the defects of high power asynchronous machines has changed due to the motors production conditions.…”