Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of electrical motors - A review

Recently, research has picked up a fervent pace in the area of fault diagnosis of electrical machines. The manufacturers and users of these drives are now keen to include diagnostic features in the software to improve salability and reliability. Apart from locating specific harmonic components in the line current (popularly known as motor current signature analysis), other signals, such as speed, torque, noise, vibration etc., are also explored for their frequency contents. Sometimes, altogether different techniques, such as thermal measurements, chemical analysis, etc., are also employed to find out the nature and the degree of the fault. In addition, human involvement in the actual fault detection decision making is slowly being replaced by automated tools, such as expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy-logic-based systems; to name a few. It is indeed evident that this area is vast in scope. Hence, keeping in mind the need for future research, a review paper describing different types of faults and the signatures they generate and their diagnostics' schemes will not be entirely out of place. In particular, such a review helps to avoid repetition of past work and gives a bird's eye view to a new researcher in this area.