Envelope Analysis on Vibration Signals for Stator Winding Fault Early Detection in 3-Phase Induction Motors

This paper brings up a novel method for detecting induction motor stator winding faults at an early stage. The contribution of the work comes from the delicate handling of motorvibration by applying envelope analysis, which makes it possible to capture electrical short-circuit signature in mechanical signals, even if the magnitude of the fault is fairly incipient. Conventional induction motor condition-based maintenance methods usually involve current and voltage measurements, which could be expensive to collect, and vibration-based analysis is often only capable of detecting the fault when it is already quite significant. In contrast, the solution presented in this study provides a refreshing perspective by applying time synchronous averaging to remove the discrete frequency component, and amplitude demodulation to further enhance the signal with the help of kurtogram. Experimental results on a three-phase induction motor show that the method is also able to distinguish different fault severity levels.