Fault Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Reliability of Electric Motors and Drives: Open Questions, Challenges and Perspectives

Fault diagnosis, failure prognosis, and reliability of electrical drives attracted an immense amount of work and interest in the last decade. The objectives are to provide timely maintenance, and increase the reliability of drives. These objectives have been hampered by some the attributes of the techniques employed: need of extensive data for data-based methods and accurate models for model-based methods, time and experiments, and uncertainty of the results and the required actions.This paper aims to identify these difficulties, the available methods to minimize those problems, the cases where these problems are less significant, new methods, and the decision tools to increase reliability.