Experimental Diagnosis of Broken Rotor Bar Faults in Induction Motors at Low Slip via Hilbert Envelope and Optimized Subtractive Clustering Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System

Abstract

Knowledge of the distinctive frequencies and amplitudes of broken rotor bar (BRB) faults in the induction motor (IM) is essential for most fault diagnosis methods. Fast Fourier transform (FFT) is widely applied to diagnose the faults within BRBs. However, this method does not provide satisfactory results if it is applied directly to the stator current signal at low slip because a high-resolution spectrum is required to separate the different components of the frequency. To address this problem, this paper proposes an efficient method based on a Hilbert fast Fourier transform (HFFT) approach, which is used to extract the envelope from the stator current using the Hilbert transform (HT) at low slip. Then, the stator current envelope is analyzed using the fast Fourier transform (FFT) to obtain the amplitude and frequency of the particular harmonic. These data were recently collected and selected as BRB fault features and were employed as adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) inputs for BRB fault autodiagnosis and classification. To identify the BRB defect by determining the number of broken bars in the rotor, two ANFIS models are proposed: ANFIS grid partitioning (ANFIS-GP) and ANFIS-subtractive clustering (ANFIS-SC). To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, three different motors were used during experiments under various loads; the first was with one broken bar, the second was with two adjacent broken bars, and the third was a healthy motor. The obtained results confirmed the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed method, which is based on the combination of HFFT-ANFIS-SC to diagnose the BRB faults and quantify the number of broken bars under different load conditions (under low and high slip) precisely with minimal errors (this method had an MSE of 10-14 and 10-7 for the RMSE) compared to the method based on the combination of HFFT-ANFIS-GP.