Rotor Fault Detection of Induction Motors Using Stator Current Signals and Wavelet Analysis

A motor is the workhorse of our industry. The issues of preventive and condition-based maintenance, online monitoring, system fault detection, diagnosis, and prognosis are of increasing importance. Different internal motor faults (e.g., inter-turn short circuits, broken bearings, broken rotor bars) along with external motor faults (e.g., phase failure, mechanical overload, blocked rotor) are expected to happen sooner or later. This paper introduces the fault detection technique of induction motors based upon the stator current. The fault motors have rotor bar broken or rotor unbalance defect, respectively. The stator currents are measured by the current meters and stored by the time domain. The time domain is not suitable to represent the current signals, so the frequency domain is applied to display the signals. The Fourier Transformer is used for the conversion of the signal. After the conversion of the signals, the features of the signals have to be extracted by the signal processing methods like a wavelet analysis, a spectrum analysis, etc. The discovered features are entered to the pattern classification model such as a neural network model, a polynomial neural network, a fuzzy inference model, etc. This paper describes the fault detection results that use wavelet decomposition. The wavelet analysis is very useful method for the time and frequency domain each. Also it is powerful method to detect the features in the signals.