Breakdown Resistance Analysis of Traction Motor Winding Insulation under Thermal Ageing

Stator inter-turn faults are among the most important electric motor failures as they progress fast and lead to catastrophic motor breakdowns. Inter-turn faults are caused due to the windings’ insulation degradation. The main stress which deteriorates the insulation is the thermal one. Proper understanding of how this stress influences the electrical properties of insulation over time may lead to reliable prognosis and estimation of the motor’s remaining useful life. In transport applications where reliability and safety come first it is a critical issue. In this paper, extensive experimental testing and statistical analysis of thin film insulation for traction motor windings has been performed under fixed thermal stress. The results indicate that for high thermal stress the electrical properties of the insulation material present a non-monotonic behavior thus proving the well-known and established Arrhenius law inadequate for modelling this type of problems and estimating the remaining useful life of thin film insulation materials

Advances in Electrical Machine, Power Electronic, and Drive Condition Monitoring and Fault Detection: State of the Art

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] Recently, research concerning electrical machines and drives condition monitoring and fault diagnosis has experienced extraordinarily dynamic activity. The increasing importance of these energy conversion devices and their widespread use in uncountable applications have motivated significant research efforts. This paper presents an analysis of the state of the art in this field. The analyzed contributions were published in most relevant journals and magazines or presented in either specific conferences in the area or more broadly scoped events.Riera-Guasp, M.; Antonino-Daviu, J.; Capolino, G. (2015). Advances in Electrical Machine, Power Electronic, and Drive Condition Monitoring and Fault Detection: State of the Art. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. 62(3):1746-1759. doi:10.1109/TIE.2014.2375853S1746175962

Recent challenges in condition monitoring of industrial electric machines

The limitations of thermal, vibration, or electrical monitoring of electric machines such as false indications, low sensitivity, and difficulty of fault interpretation have recently been exposed. This has led to a shift in the direction in research towards applying new techniques for improving the reliability of condition monitoring. With the changing environment, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the recent trend in the industrial demand and research activity in condition monitoring technology. The new developments in insulation testing, electrical testing, flux analysis, transient analysis, and fault prognostics are summarized. The future challenges and recommendations for future work for the new technologies are also stated to support researchers target research/development efforts according to industrial needs

On-line condition monitoring for diagnosis and prognosis of insulation degradation of inverter-fed machines

Real-time winding insulation condition monitoring is becoming an important research topic in response to increase in high availability and reliability demands in modern drives. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to monitor ground-wall insulation of low voltage inverter-fed machines based on a multi-frequency measurement of equivalent insulation ground-wall capacitance and dissipation factor. The monitoring is applied to four machine stator samples subjected to accelerated aging until failure. Insulation degradation is continuously tracked via the capacitance and dissipation parameters. A link between ground-wall insulation capacitance and final lifetime is established. The relationship between capacitance progression and its value at final machine failure is used to develop a method for prognosis of the final failure time

A Review in Fault Diagnosis and Health Assessment for Railway Traction Drives

During the last decade, due to the increasing importance of reliability and availability, railway industry is making greater use of fault diagnosis approaches for early fault detection, as well as Condition-based maintenance frameworks. Due to the influence of traction drive in the railway system availability, several research works have been focused on Fault Diagnosis for Railway traction drives. Fault diagnosis approaches have been applied to electric machines, sensors and power electronics. Furthermore, Condition-based maintenance framework seems to reduce corrective and Time-based maintenance works in Railway Systems. However, there is not any publication that summarizes all the research works carried out in Fault diagnosis and Condition-based Maintenance frameworks for Railway Traction Drives. Thus, this review presents the development of Health Assessment and Fault Diagnosis in Railway Traction Drives during the last decade

Modern Diagnostics Techniques for Electrical Machines, Power Electronics, and Drives

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] For the last ten years, at least three different special sections dealing with diagnostics in power electrical engineering have been published in the IEEE transactions on industrial electronics [1]-[5]. All of them had their specificities, but the last ones, starting in 2011, were more connected to relevant events organized on the topic. In fact, these events have been clearly the only international forums fully dedicated to diagnostics techniques in power electrical engineering. For this particular issue, it has been decided to separate the different submissions into six parts: state of the art; general methods; induction machines (IMs); synchronous machines (SMs); . electrical drives; power components and power converters. The second section includes only one state-of-the-art paper, which is dedicated to actual techniques implemented in both industry and research laboratories. The third section includes three papers on diagnostic techniques not specifically aimed at a particular type of machine. The fourth section includes three papers devoted to diagnostics of rotor faults, two dedicated to stator insulation issues, and four papers dealing with mechanical faults diagnosis in IMs. The fifth section includes papers focusing on different types of SMs. The first two papers deal with wound-rotor SMs, the following three papers are dedicated to permanent-magnet radial flux machines, and the last one deals with permanent-magnet axial flux machines. Regarding the types of faults analyzed, there are three papers devoted to the diagnosis of interturn short circuits in the stator windings, i.e., one dedicated to the detection and location of field-winding-to-ground faults and a paper devoted to the diagnosis of static eccentricities. In the sixth section, two papers investigate issues related to faults in drive sensors, and one is devoted to fault detections in the coupling inductors. The last section includes two papers devoted to diagnosis of faults and losses analysis in switching components of power converters.Capolino, G.; Antonino-Daviu, J.; Riera-Guasp, M. (2015). Modern Diagnostics Techniques for Electrical Machines, Power Electronics, and Drives. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. 62(3):1738-1745. doi:10.1109/TIE.2015.2391186S1738174562

Health Monitoring Techniques for High Availability Drives

The growing number and need for high availability drives in the modern world places high importance on reliability and operational availability. Part of the solution to the increased requirements on availability involves monitoring degradation associated with machine failure, diagnosing the mode of failure and predicting into the future to a possible time to failure. Broad multi-disciplinary knowledge is required to understand drive ageing and implement monitoring systems. This research reviews the failure modes associated with high availability drives, in particular with regards to low voltage random wound permanent magnet inverter driven machines. The main failure modes are presented, with analysis of available literature regarding machine failure. Gaps in literature are identified and the most common failure modes of the low voltage machine, bearing and winding damage are presented. Currently the area of least understanding in the field of drive health monitoring involves the measurement and analysis of winding insulation failure. The modes of insulation failure are investigated in detail and a new model for ground-wall insulation is developed. Methods to measure insulation ground-wall insulation have been reviewed, and a new method has been developed to monitor the ground-wall insulation health, during machine operation, using common-mode current inherent in inverter driven machines during operation. To expand the knowledge of insulation failure, the novel insulation health monitoring method is used to monitor four stators during an accelerated ageing test, representing monitoring of insulation of real machine lifetimes. The results are analysed and additional testing is presented in order to develop the monitoring system for standard industry drives. The major conclusion from results indicates that insulation degradation progression follows a deterministic trend, with clearly defined threshold of failure, allowing prognosis of lifetime based on monitored parameters. Future work recommendations are made to expand on the findings during the course of research

Dielectric characteristics of electric vehicle traction motor winding insulation under thermal ageing

The electric motor is the heart of the electric vehicle. It is crucial that any occurring faults are detected promptly so that a catastrophic failure is avoided. At the same time, deep knowledge of the degradation mechanisms is required to allow maximum performance at minimum cost. This paper focuses on this balance. Statistical results from measurements of unaged and accelerated aged winding insulation samples provide information about the degradation processes, enabling steps toward a reliable prognosis model of the motor's remaining life

Impact of PWM Voltage Waveforms in High-Speed Drives: A Survey on High-Frequency Motor Models and Partial Discharge Phenomenon

The insulation system’s dielectric of the electric motor is very often subjected to severe electrical stress generated by the high dv/dt seen at the machine’s terminals. The electrical stress and high reflected wave transient overvoltage are even more evident in case of high-speed machines fed by high-frequency (HF) converters featuring very fast wide-bandgap devices. They are promoting the occurrence of partial discharges and consequently accelerate ageing. As this is serious issue and the main cause of the drive failure, it is important to analyse and characterise the surges at the motor terminals. Several HF models of motors have been proposed in the literature for this purpose. This article presents a survey on HF motor models, which is crucial in understanding and studying the most critical parameter identification and overvoltage mitigation techniques. Moreover, it offers a comparison of the models’ main features as well as a comparison with the experimental voltage waveform at motor terminals. A general overview of the partial discharge (PD) phenomenon is also provided, as it is favoured by HF operation and together with HF motor modelling provides key insights to the insulation ageing issue. In particular, an analysis of the effects of PWM waveform affecting insulation is given, as well as useful methods for developing strategies for the inspection and maintenance of winding insulation

Detection and classification of turn fault and high resistance connection fault in permanent magnet machines based on zero sequence voltage

Health monitoring and fault detection are becoming more and more important in electrical machine systems due to the increasing demand for reliability. Winding turn fault is a common fault in permanent magnet machines which can cause severe damages and requires prompt detection and mitigation. High resistance connection (HRC) fault which result in phase asymmetry may also occur but does not require immediate shutdown. Thus, apart from the fault detection, the classification between the two faults is also required. In this paper, a new technique for detecting and classifying turn fault and HRC fault by utilizing both the high and low frequency components of the zero sequence voltage is proposed. The dependence on the operating conditions is minimized with the proposed fault indicators. The effectiveness of fault detection and classification has been verified by extensive experimental tests on a triple redundant fault tolerant permanent magnet assisted synchronous reluctance machine (PMA SynRM). The robustness of the turn fault detection in transient states and under no load conditions has also been demonstrated