Noninvasive Methods for Condition Monitoring and Electrical Fault Diagnosis of Induction Motors

This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of noninvasive methods to diagnose stator winding insulation faults of an induction motor. Further, a novel noninvasive method is proposed to diagnose the root cause of winding failure due to unbalanced voltage to avoid catastrophic failure. Therefore, a winding function approach is utilized to derive an analytical expression for stator winding distribution and magnetomotive force (MMF). This tactic qualifies the conductor segment that generates MMF, and it also helps to analyze a healthy current spectrum. One can easily observe higher order harmonics in current spectrum; therefore, a new series of rotor harmonics is introduced to diagnose unbalanced supply. The locus of these harmonics is dependent on the poles, rotor bars, and slip. Due to the rapid complexity in industrial plants, it is inconceivable to continue human inspection to diagnose the faults. Thus, to avoid human inspection, in addition to new series of rotor harmonic, a fully automatic method based on neural network is proposed. This method not only diagnoses unbalanced voltage but it also recognize the percentage of unbalanced voltage by use of feed-forward multilayer perceptron (MLP) trained by back propagation. Finally, the experimental results shows the validation of this research work proposed method