A Simple Real-Time Fault Signature Monitoring Tool for Motor-Drive-Embedded Fault Diagnosis Systems

The reference frame theory constitutes an essential aspect of electric machine analysis and control. In this study, apart from the conventional applications, it is reported that the reference frame theory approach can successfully be applied to real-time fault diagnosis of electric machinery systems as a powerful toolbox to find the magnitude and phase quantities of fault signatures with good precision as well. The basic idea is to convert the associated fault signature to a dc quantity, followed by the computation of the signal's average in the fault reference frame to filter out the rest of the signal harmonics, i.e., its ac components. As a natural consequence of this, neither a notch filter nor a low-pass filter is required to eliminate fundamental component or noise content. Since the incipient fault mechanisms have been studied for a long time, the motor fault signature frequencies and fault models are very well-known. Therefore, ignoring all other components, the proposed method focuses only on certain fault signatures in the current spectrum depending on the examined motor fault. Broken rotor bar and eccentricity faults are experimentally tested online using a TMS320F2812 digital signal processor (DSP) to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. In this application, only the readily available drive hardware is used without employing additional components such as analog filters, signal conditioning board, external sensors, etc. As the motor drive processing unit, the DSP is utilized both for motor control and fault detection purposes, providing instantaneous fault information. The proposed algorithm processes the measured data in real time to avoid buffering and large-size memory needed in order to enhance the practicability of this method. Due to the short-time convergence capability of the algorithm, the fault status is updated in each second. The immunity of the algorithm against non-ideal cases such as measurement offset errors and phase unbalance is theoretically and experimentally verified. Being a model-independent fault analyzer, this method can be applied to all multiphase and single-phase motors.