A Comparison of Techniques for Fault Detection in Inverter-Fed Induction Motors in Transient Regime

Fault detection in induction motors operating in non-stationary regimes has become a need in today's industry. Most of the works published deal with line-fed motors. Nevertheless, the number of inverter-fed induction motors has significantly increased in recent years. Therefore, several fault detection techniques have been proposed lately for this type of motors, based mainly on an adequate input signal processing to obtain fault signatures in the time-frequency domain. In this paper, a comparison of time-frequency techniques applied to fault detection in inverter-fed induction motors in a transient state is presented. For that purpose, the techniques are applied to two current signals acquired from two induction motors with two types of faults: bar breakage and mixed eccentricity. The paper shows the particularities and special difficulties of diagnosing under this type of feeding, reviewing the works related to each technique. The strengths and weaknesses of these techniques are discussed with the goal of providing a criterion for its application in an industrial environment and guidance for future developments in this field.