Complex Signal Analysis for Inter-Turn Short-Circuits Faults on Induction Motors

Automatic detection of early-stage electrical faults in motors is challenging because physical signals, such as temperature or vibrations, are often linked to regular machine operation. Inter-turn short-circuit (ITSC) faults in the stator winding are a leading cause of irreversible damage. Given industrial demands, there is an ongoing need for innovative approaches that reduce dimensionality and expedite feature extraction from three-phase current signals. This work presents an ITSC multifault classification algorithm by modeling the behavior of three-phase stator currents in a complex space. To achieve this, two geometric-based and two optimization-based approaches are employed to parameterize the shape of the complex signal. Rather than directly extracting features from the raw signals, these parameters capture the similarities among incipient failures. The algorithm is evaluated using machine-learning classifiers trained on a dataset generated from an experimental test bench and a publicly available dataset. The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 95.30% across 13 categories, demonstrating its robustness and reliability and positioning it as a highly competitive alternative to state-of-the-art techniques.