Short-Circuit Fault Diagnosis on Induction Motors through Electric Current Phasor Analysis and Fuzzy Logic

Online monitoring of induction motors has increased significantly in recent years because these devices are essential components of any industrial process. Incipient fault detection in induction motors avoids interruptions in manufacturing processes and facilitates maintenance tasks to reduce induction motor timeout. Therefore, the proposal of novel approaches to assist in the detection and classification of induction motor faults is in order. In this work, a reliable and noninvasive novel technique that does not require computational demanding operations, since it just performs arithmetic calculations, is introduced for detecting and locating short-circuit faults in the stator windings of an induction motor. This method relies on phasor analysis and the RMS values of line currents, followed by a small set of simple if-then rules to perform the diagnosis and identification of stator winding faults. Obtained results from different experimental tests on a rewound induction motor stator to induce short-circuit faults demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of identifying and locating incipient and advanced deficiencies in the windings’ insulation with high effectiveness.