Reference Signal Injection in Induction Motors Drives to Electrical Failures Detection

This paper shows an alternative method to electrical fault diagnosis in three-phase induction motors using reference signal injection. The proposal is based on the insertion of search reference harmonic signals in the supply voltage by the frequency inverter module of the induction machine and the observation of the signals of the electric current of the motor, preprocessed through the FFT and machine signature component analysis. In order to obtain a greater precision of fault classification and state of degradation through intelligent systems, results are validated by different algorithms whose performance are compared in the following methods: k nearest neighbors, naive Bayes, support vector machine, multilayer perceptron and decision tree. The practical results for the tests with controlled simulation of the electrical faults of broken rotor bars and short circuit in stator windings show the capacity that this insertion technique has when it is used as a tool to diagnose three-phase induction motors. The five proposals of intelligent systems result in a classification with success rates of 93% to 100% in different classes, separated into types of faults and according to the degradation intensity.