Extracting Broken-Rotor-Bar Fault Signature of Varying-Speed Induction Motors

Abstract

An effective way to detect broken-bar faults of squirrel-cage induction motors is to extract the characteristic frequency component in the stator current as a fault signature, or so-called motor current signature analysis (MCSA). However, for inverter-fed motor drive systems, the motor is typically operating under varying-speed, varying-load, and noisy environments, which makes the fault signature extraction a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a sparsity-driven and graph-based method to extract the fault signature effectively, where the fault signature is modeled as a sparse component in the frequency domain for each short-time window measurement while gradually changing from window to window in the time-domain. Compared to the conventional short-time Fourier transform-based method, our method is more robust to noise and varying speed operations. Experiments are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.