Currents Analysis of a Brushless Motor with Inverter Faults—Part II: Diagnostic Method for Open-Circuit Fault Isolation

Abstract

In this paper, a brushless motor with a three-phase inverter is investigated under healthy and multiple open-circuit faults. The occurrence of faults in an inverter will lead to atypical characteristics in the current measurements. This is why many usual entropies and multiscale entropies have been proposed to evaluate the complexity of the output currents by quantifying such dynamic changes. Among this multitude of entropies, only some are able to differentiate between healthy and faulty open-circuit conditions. In addition, another selection is made between these entropies in order to improve diagnostic speed. After the fault detection based on the mean values, the open-circuit faults are localized based on the fault diagnostic method. The simulation results ensure the ability of these entropies to detect and locate open-circuit faults. Moreover, they are able to achieve fault diagnostics for a single switch, double switches, three switches, and even four switches. The diagnostic time to detect and to isolate faults is between 10.85 ms and 13.67 ms. Then, in order to prove the ability of the fault diagnostic method, a load variation is performed under the rated speed conditions of the brushless motor. The validity of the method is analyzed under different speed values for a constant torque. Finally, the fault diagnostic method is independent from power levels.