Abstract

Induction motors fed through variable speed drives (VSD) are widely used in different industrial processes. Nowadays, the industry demands the integration of smart sensors to improve the fault detection in order to reduce cost, maintenance and power consumption. Induction motors can develop one or more faults at the same time that can be produce severe damages. The combined fault identification in induction motors is a demanding task, but it has been rarely considered in spite of being a common situation, because it is difficult to identify two or more faults simultaneously. This work presents a smart sensor for online detection of simple and multiple-combined faults in induction motors fed through a VSD in a wide frequency range covering low frequencies from 3 Hz and high frequencies up to 60 Hz based on a primary sensor being a commercially available current clamp or a hall-effect sensor. The proposed smart sensor implements a methodology based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT), RMS calculation and artificial neural networks (ANN), which are processed online using digital hardware signal processing based on field programmable gate array (FPGA).

Highlights

  • Induction motors are widely used in industry due to their robustness, low cost, easy maintenance and versatility; representing 85% of power consumption worldwide

  • This work proposes a new smart sensor for online detection of multiple-combined faults in variable speed drives (VSD)-fed induction motors using only a Hall-effect current sensor as primary sensor in one-phase of the induction motor, which results in a high portability

  • The proposed methodology is based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and an artificial neural networks (ANN) classifier in order to determine the motor condition according to the motor operation frequency controlled by the VSD, the simplicity of this methodology allows analyzing the frequencies of interest excited by the different failures

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Summary

Introduction

Induction motors are widely used in industry due to their robustness, low cost, easy maintenance and versatility; representing 85% of power consumption worldwide. Induction motor faults are mainly associated to bearing defects (BD), rotor faults such as broken bars (BRB) [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18], unbalance (UNB) [19] and misalignment (MAL) [20,21,22,23] According to these faults, sometimes two or more of them may develop simultaneously, making it important to identify if they are alone or combined. The connection of induction motors through variable speed drives (VSD), which allow controlling their rotational speed, extending their useful life, and saving energy is a common practice in industry [32,33,34,35], but with the undesired effect of making the detection of faults more difficult because of the spurious harmonics induced by the VSD operation

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