Unintrusive Monitoring of Induction Motors Bearings via Deep Learning on Stator Currents

Induction motors are fundamental components of several modern automation system, and they are one of the central pivot of the developing e-mobility era. The most vulnerable parts of an induction motor are the bearings, the stator winding and the rotor bars. Consequently, monitoring and maintaining them during operations is vital. In this work, authors propose an Induction Motors bearings monitoring tool which leverages on stator currents signals processed with a Deep Learning architecture. Differently from the state-of-the-art approaches which exploit vibration signals, collected by easily damageable and intrusive vibration probes, the stator currents signals are already commonly available, or easily and unintrusively collectable. Moreover, instead of using now-classical data-driven models, authors exploit a Deep Learning architecture able to extract from the stator current signal a compact and expressive representation of the bearings state, ultimately providing a bearing fault detection system. In order to estimate the effectiveness of the proposal, authors collected a series of data from an inverter-fed motor mounting different artificially damaged bearings. Results show that the proposed approach provides a promising and effective yet simple bearing fault detection system

Machine Learning based Early Fault Diagnosis of Induction Motor for Electric Vehicle Application

Electrified vehicular industry is growing at a rapid pace with a global increase in production of electric vehicles (EVs) along with several new automotive cars companies coming to compete with the big car industries. The technology of EV has evolved rapidly in the last decade. But still the looming fear of low driving range, inability to charge rapidly like filling up gasoline for a conventional gas car, and lack of enough EV charging stations are just a few of the concerns. With the onset of self-driving cars, and its popularity in integrating them into electric vehicles leads to increase in safety both for the passengers inside the vehicle as well as the people outside. Since electric vehicles have not been widely used over an extended period of time to evaluate the failure rate of the powertrain of the EV, a general but definite understanding of motor failures can be developed from the usage of motors in industrial application. Since traction motors are more power dense as compared to industrial motors, the possibilities of a small failure aggravating to catastrophic issue is high. Understanding the challenges faced in EV due to stator fault in motor, with major focus on induction motor stator winding fault, this dissertation presents the following: 1. Different Motor Failures, Causes and Diagnostic Methods Used, With More Importance to Artificial Intelligence Based Motor Fault Diagnosis. 2. Understanding of Incipient Stator Winding Fault of IM and Feature Selection for Fault Diagnosis 3. Model Based Temperature Feature Prediction under Incipient Fault Condition 4. Design of Harmonics Analysis Block for Flux Feature Prediction 5. Flux Feature based On-line Harmonic Compensation for Fault-tolerant Control 6. Intelligent Flux Feature Predictive Control for Fault-Tolerant Control 7. Introduction to Machine Learning and its Application for Flux Reference Prediction 8. Dual Memorization and Generalization Machine Learning based Stator Fault Diagnosi

Fault Detection and Diagnosis of Electric Drives Using Intelligent Machine Learning Approaches

Electric motor condition monitoring can detect anomalies in the motor performance which have the potential to result in unexpected failure and financial loss. This study examines different fault detection and diagnosis approaches in induction motors and is presented in six chapters. First, an anomaly technique or outlier detection is applied to increase the accuracy of detecting broken rotor bars. It is shown how the proposed method can significantly improve network reliability by using one-class classification technique. Then, ensemble-based anomaly detection is utilized to compare different methods in ensemble learning in detection of broken rotor bars. Finally, a deep neural network is developed to extract significant features to be used as input parameters of the network. Deep autoencoder is then employed to build an advanced model to make predictions of broken rotor bars and bearing faults occurring in induction motors with a high accuracy

Componential coding in the condition monitoring of electrical machines Part 2: application to a conventional machine and a novel machine

This paper (Part 2) presents the practical application of componential coding, the principles of which were described in the accompanying Part 1 paper. Four major issues are addressed, including optimization of the neural network, assessment of the anomaly detection results, development of diagnostic approaches (based on the reconstruction error) and also benchmarking of componential coding with other techniques (including waveform measures, Fourier-based signal reconstruction and principal component analysis). This is achieved by applying componential coding to the data monitored from both a conventional induction motor and from a novel transverse flux motor. The results reveal that machine condition monitoring using componential coding is not only capable of detecting and then diagnosing anomalies but it also outperforms other conventional techniques in that it is able to separate very small and localized anomalies

Online Condition Monitoring of Electric Powertrains using Machine Learning and Data Fusion

Safe and reliable operations of industrial machines are highly prioritized in industry. Typical industrial machines are complex systems, including electric motors, gearboxes and loads. A fault in critical industrial machines may lead to catastrophic failures, service interruptions and productivity losses, thus condition monitoring systems are necessary in such machines. The conventional condition monitoring or fault diagnosis systems using signal processing, time and frequency domain analysis of vibration or current signals are widely used in industry, requiring expensive and professional fault analysis team. Further, the traditional diagnosis methods mainly focus on single components in steady-state operations. Under dynamic operating conditions, the measured quantities are non-stationary, thus those methods cannot provide reliable diagnosis results for complex gearbox based powertrains, especially in multiple fault contexts. In this dissertation, four main research topics or problems in condition monitoring of gearboxes and powertrains have been identified, and novel solutions are provided based on data-driven approach. The first research problem focuses on bearing fault diagnosis at early stages and dynamic working conditions. The second problem is to increase the robustness of gearbox mixed fault diagnosis under noise conditions. Mixed fault diagnosis in variable speeds and loads has been considered as third problem. Finally, the limitation of labelled training or historical failure data in industry is identified as the main challenge for implementing data-driven algorithms. To address mentioned problems, this study aims to propose data-driven fault diagnosis schemes based on order tracking, unsupervised and supervised machine learning, and data fusion. All the proposed fault diagnosis schemes are tested with experimental data, and key features of the proposed solutions are highlighted with comparative studies.publishedVersio

Induction Machine Stator Fault Tracking using the Growing Curvilinear Component Analysis

Detection of stator-based faults in Induction Machines (IMs) can be carried out in numerous ways. In particular, the shorted turns in stator windings of IM are among the most common faults in the industry. As a matter of fact, most IMs come with pre-installed current sensors for the purpose of control and protection. At this aim, using only the stator current for fault detection has become a recent trend nowadays as it is much cheaper than installing additional sensors. The three-phase stator current signatures have been used in this study to observe the effect of stator inter-turn fault with respect to the healthy condition of the IM. The pre-processing of the healthy and faulty current signatures has been done via the in-built DSP module of dSPACE after which, these current signatures are passed into the MATLAB® software for further analysis using AI techniques. The authors present a Growing Curvilinear Component Analysis (GCCA) neural network that is capable of detecting and follow the evolution of the stator fault using the stator current signature, making online fault detection possible. For this purpose, a topological manifold analysis is carried out to study the fault evolution, which is a fundamental step for calibrating the GCCA neural network. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified experimentally

Multiple-fault detection and identification scheme based on hierarchical self-organizing maps applied to an electric machine

Strategies of condition monitoring applied to electric motors play an important role in the competitiveness of multiple industrial sectors. However, the risk of faults coexistence in an electric motor and the overlapping of their effects in the considered physical magnitudes represent, currently, a critical limitation to provide reliable diagnosis outcomes. In this regard, additional investigation efforts are required towards high-dimensional data fusion schemes, particularly over the features calculation and features reduction, which represent two decisive stages in such data-driven approaches. In this study, a novel multiple-fault detection and identification methodology supported by a feature-level fusion strategy and a Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) hierarchical structure is proposed. The condition diagnosis as well as the corresponding estimated probability are obtained. Moreover, the proposed method allows the visualization of the results while preserving the underlying physical phenomenon of the system under monitoring. The proposed scheme is performed sequentially; first, a set of statistical-time based features is estimated from different physical magnitudes. Second, a hybrid feature reduction method is proposed, composed by an initial soft feature reduction, based on sequential floating forward selection to remove the less informative features, and followed by a hierarchical SOM structure which reveals directly the diagnosis and probability assessment. The effectiveness of the proposed detection and identification scheme is validated with a complete set of experimental data including healthy and five faulty conditions. The accuracy’s results are compared with classical condition monitoring approaches in order to validate the competency of the proposed method.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Application of a wavelet neural network approach to detect stator winding short circuits in asynchronous machines

Introduction. Nowadays, fault diagnosis of induction machines plays an important role in industrial fields. In this paper, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model has been proposed for automatic fault diagnosis of an induction machine. The aim of this research study is to design a neural network model that allows generating a large database. This database can cover maximum possible of the stator faults. The fault considered in this study take into account a short circuit with large variations in the machine load. Moreover, the objective is to automate the diagnosis algorithm by using ANN classifier. Method. The database used for the ANN is based on indicators which are obtained from wavelet analysis of the machine stator current of one phase. The developed neural model allows to taking in consideration imbalances which are generated by short circuits in the machine stator. The implemented mathematical model in the expert system is based on a three-phase model. The mathematical parameters considered in this model are calculated online. The characteristic vector of the ANN model is formed by decomposition of stator current signal using wavelet discrete technique. Obtained results show that this technique allows to ensure more detection with clear evaluation of turn number in short circuit. Also, the developed expert system for the taken configurations is characterized by high precision.Вступ. Нині діагностика несправностей асинхронних машин відіграє значну роль у промисловості. У цій статті запропоновано модель штучної нейронної мережі для автоматичної діагностики несправностей асинхронної машини. Метою цього дослідження є розробка моделі нейронної мережі, що дозволяє генерувати велику базу даних. Ця база може охоплювати максимально можливі несправності статора. Несправності, розглянуті у цьому дослідженні, враховують коротке замикання при великих коливаннях навантаження машини. Крім того, мета полягає в тому, щоб автоматизувати алгоритм діагностики за допомогою класифікатора штучної нейронної мережі. Метод. База даних, що використовується для штучної нейронної мережі, заснована на показниках, отриманих в результаті вейвлет-аналізу струму статора машини однієї фази. Розроблена нейронна модель дозволяє враховувати дисбаланси, що виникають при коротких замиканнях у статорі машини. Реалізована математична модель в експертній системі ґрунтується на трифазній моделі. Математичні параметри, що враховуються в цій моделі, розраховуються онлайн. Характеристичний вектор моделі штучної нейронної мережі формується шляхом розкладання сигналу струму статора з використанням вейвлет-дискретного методу. Отримані результати показують, що дана методика дозволяє забезпечити більше виявлення з чіткою оцінкою числа витків при короткому замиканні. Також розроблена експертна система для конфігурацій, що приймаються, відрізняється високою точністю