Asymmetrical Fault Detection in Induction Motors Through Elimination of Load Torque Oscillations Effects in the Slight Speed Variations and Steady-State Conditions

Recently, motor current signature analysis has been widely considered for fault detections due to its simplicity, availability, and cost-effectiveness. The rotor asymmetry fault (RAF) is the most common fault that occurs in induction machines. It is extremely challenging to detect RAF indices occurred at the vicinity of the supply frequency. Moreover, load torque oscillations (LTOs), which appear as a sinusoidal phase modulation of the supply frequency, exhibit similar indications as the RAF, especially in gearbox-based electromechanical systems. Since LTOs lead to false alarm of RAF, separation of LTOs indices from RAF characteristic components is inevitable. In this article, normalized frequency domain energy operator (NFDEO) is evaluated for demodulation and separation of RAF and LTOs in steady-state and transient conditions. Moreover, the proposed method is tested in both with-and-without speed control strategies. In this regard, the effects of RAF in the presence of LTOs investigated through both synthetic signals and experimental data in steady-state and transient conditions with slight variation in rotor speed. The obtained results show that NFDEO along with Winger–Ville can effectively detect RAF in the presence of LTOs even with speed control strategy.