An Analysis of Vibrations and Currents for Broken Rotor Bar Detection in Three-phase Induction Motors

Abstract

Selecting the physical property capable of representing the health state of a machine is an important step in designing fault detection systems. In addition, variation of the loading condition is a challenge in deploying an industrial predictive maintenance solution. The robustness of the physical properties to variations in loading conditions is, therefore, an important consideration. In this paper, we focus specifically on squirrel cage induction motors and analyze the capabilities of three-phase current and five vibration signals acquired from different locations of the motor for the detection of Broken Rotor Bar generated in different loads. In particular, we examine the mentioned signals in relation to the performance of classifiers trained with them. Regarding the classifiers, we employ deep conventional classifiers and also propose a hybrid classifier that utilizes contrastive loss in order to mitigate the effect of different variations. The analysis shows that vibration signals are more robust under varying load conditions. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid classifier outperforms conventional classifiers and is able to achieve an accuracy of 90.96% when using current signals and 97.69% when using vibration signals.