Modeling Common-Mode Current Due to Asymmetric Aging of Machine Winding Insulation

Machine stator winding insulation degradation is one of the main results of machine aging. It is non-negligible once this degradation process becomes asymmetric between phases. The traditional way to determine the insulation state of health is a partial discharge test. However, this method requires the system offline, which causes production loss and extra administrative burden. This paper presents an idea for better characterizing the insulation machine's state of health using common-mode (CM) behavior in the machine-drive system. With the help of circuit decomposition methods and modeling tools, the CM quantities due to asymmetric aging show a unique characteristic that distinguishes itself from other differential-mode (DM) quantities in the equivalent circuit. It is shown effective to represent the asymmetric aging effect from the detection of system leakage current. This paper provides an analytical method to quantify this characteristic from mathematical approaches, and a proper approximation has been made on the CM equivalent model (CEM) such that the CM behavior is accurately characterized. The proposed method will serve the purpose of predicting machine abnormal behavior using the simple RLC circuit. Researchers can adapt this method to quantify and characterize the machine insulation state of health (SOH).