Recently, research has picked up a fervent pace in the area of fault diagnosis of electrical machines. The manufacturers and users of these drives are now keen to include diagnostic features in the software to improve salability and reliability. Apart from locating specific harmonic components in the line current (popularly known as motor current signature analysis), other signals, such as speed, torque, noise, vibration etc., are also explored for their frequency contents. Sometimes, altogether different techniques, such as thermal measurements, chemical analysis, etc., are also employed to find out the nature and the degree of the fault. In addition, human involvement in the actual fault detection decision making is slowly being replaced by automated tools, such as expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy-logic-based systems; to name a few. It is indeed evident that this area is vast in scope. Hence, keeping in mind the need for future research, a review paper describing different types of faults and the signatures they generate and their diagnostics' schemes will not be entirely out of place. In particular, such a review helps to avoid repetition of past work and gives a bird's eye view to a new researcher in this area.

Condition Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis of Electrical Motors&#8212;A Review

This paper is intended as a tutorial overview of induction motors signature analysis as a medium for fault detection. The purpose is to introduce in a concise manner the fundamental theory, main results, and practical applications of motor signature analysis for the detection and the localization of abnormal electrical and mechanical conditions that indicate, or may lead to, a failure of induction motors. The paper is focused on the so-called motor current signature analysis which utilizes the results of spectral analysis of the stator current. The paper is purposefully written without "state-of-the-art" terminology for the benefit of practising engineers in facilities today who may not be familiar with signal processing.

A review of induction motors signature analysis as a medium for faults detection

This paper investigates diagnostic techniques for electrical machines with special reference to induction machines and to papers published in the last ten years. A comprehensive list of references is reported and examined, and research activities classified into four main topics: 1) electrical faults; 2) mechanical faults; 3) signal processing for analysis and monitoring; and 4) artificial intelligence and decision-making techniques.

Advances in Diagnostic Techniques for Induction Machines

Early detection of the motor faults is essential and artificial neural networks are widely used for this purpose. The typical systems usually encapsulate two distinct blocks: feature extraction and classification. Such fixed and hand-crafted features may be a suboptimal choice and require a significant computational cost that will prevent their usage for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate motor condition monitoring and early fault-detection system using 1-D convolutional neural networks that has an inherent adaptive design to fuse the feature extraction and classification phases of the motor fault detection into a single learning body. The proposed approach is directly applicable to the raw data (signal), and, thus, eliminates the need for a separate feature extraction algorithm resulting in more efficient systems in terms of both speed and hardware. Experimental results obtained using real motor data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for real-time motor condition monitoring.

Real-Time Motor Fault Detection by 1-D Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper is intended as a tutorial overview of induction motors signature analysis as a medium for fault detection. The purpose is to introduce in a concise manner the fundamental theory, main results, and practical applications of motor signature analysis for the detection and the localization of abnormal electrical and mechanical conditions that indicate, or may lead to, a failure of induction motors. The paper is focused on the so-called motor current signature analysis (MCSA) which utilizes the results of spectral analysis of the stator current. The paper is purposefully written without "state of the art" terminology for the benefit of practicing engineers in facilities today who may not be familiar with signal processing.

This paper addresses the application of motor current spectral analysis for the detection of rolling-element bearing damage in induction machines. Vibration monitoring of mechanical bearing frequencies is currently used to detect the presence of a fault condition. Since these mechanical vibrations are associated with variations in the physical air gap of the machine, the air gap flux density is modulated and stator currents are generated at predictable frequencies related to the electrical supply and vibrational frequencies. This paper takes the initial step of investigating the efficacy of current monitoring for bearing fault detection by correlating the relationship between vibration and current frequencies caused by incipient bearing failures. The bearing failure modes are reviewed and the characteristic bearing frequencies associated with the physical construction of the bearings are defined. The effects on the stator current spectrum are described and the related frequencies determined. This is an important result in the formulation of a fault detection scheme that monitors the stator currents. Experimental results which show the vibration and current spectra of an induction machine with different bearing faults are used to verify the relationship between the vibrational and current frequencies. The test results clearly illustrate that the stator current signature can be used to identify the presence of a bearing fault. >

R.G. Bartfield

Papers

Motor bearing damage detection using stator current monitoring