A Method for the Determination of Fault and Wear Types in Induction Motor's Bearings

The main objective of this work is to investigate the feasibility of a method to determine the fault and wear type in induction motor's bearings. Instead of attaching a vibration sensor in close proximity to the bearings and examining its signal for any frequency components that indicate a flaw, this approach considers the stator current of the motor that is fed by a frequency inverter. Therefore, the motor (mounted on a test rig) will be quipped with bearings of known fault. By performing a thorough examination of the stator current signal, a method will be presented that is capable of indicating the fault and wear type of the bearing. In this work, the examined fault types (installed bearings with known fault) are fretting wear, abrasive wear and corroded bearings.