Thermographic Fault Diagnosis of Shaft of BLDC Motor

Abstract

A technique of thermographic fault diagnosis of the shaft of a BLDC (Brushless Direct Current Electric) motor is presented in this article. The technique works for the shivering of the thermal imaging camera in the range of 0–1.5 [m/s2]. An electric shaver was used as the source of the BLDC motor. The following states of the BLDC motor were analyzed: Healthy BLDC motor (HB), BLDC motor with one faulty shaft (1FSB), BLDC motor with two faulty shafts (2FSB), and BLDC motor with three faulty shafts (3FSB). A new method of feature extraction named PNID (power of normalized image difference) was presented. Deep neural networks were used for the analysis of thermal images of the faulty shaft of the BLDC motor: GoogLeNet, ResNet50, and EfficientNet-b0. The results of the proposed technique were very good. PNID, GoogLeNet, ResNet50, and EfficientNet-b0 have an efficiency of recognition equal to 100% for four classes.