An Improved Method for Discerning Broken Rotor Bar Fault and Load Oscillation in Induction Motors

Abstract

A few methods for discerning broken rotor bar (BRB) fault and load oscillation in induction motors have been reported in the literature. However, they all perhaps inevitably fail in adverse cases in which these two phenomena are simultaneously present. To tackle this problem, an improved method for discerning BRB fault and load oscillation is proposed in this paper based on the following work. On the one hand, the theoretical basis is analytically extended to include such an adverse case, yielding some important findings on the spectra of the instantaneous reactive and active powers. A novel strategy is thus outlined to correctly discern BRB fault and load oscillation even when simultaneously present. On the other hand, Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Technique (ESPRIT) is adopted as the spectral analysis technique to deal with the instantaneous reactive and active powers, yielding a certain improvement compared to the existing methods, adopting Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can correctly discern BRB fault and load oscillation even when simultaneously present.