Broken Rotor Bars Fault Detection in Squirrel Cage Induction Machines

Amine Yazidi, Humberto Henao, Member IEEE, Grard-Andr Capolino, Fellow IEEE
Department of Electrical Engineering - University of Picardie - 33, rue St Leu 80000 Amiens - FRANCE E-mails: Amine.Yazidi@u-picardie.fr, Humberto.Henao@u-picardie.fr, Gerard.Capolino@u-picardie.fr

Abstract Intensive research efforts have been focused on the

signature analysis (SA) to detect electrical and mechanical faults of three-phase squirrel-cage induction machines. For this purpose, different signals can be used such as stator voltages, stator currents, stray flux and input power. The diagnosis methods based on current signals analysis (CSA) are the most popular. The interpretation of one-phase current spectrum or three-phase current space vector spectrum provides direct information on the presence of abnormal conditions. In this paper, attention has been paid to the stray flux for rotor fault diagnosis of the three-phase squirrel-cage induction machines. Index Terms Induction machine Rotor broken bars Stray flux Diagnosis

Inter-turn fault of a rotor phase winding for slip-ring machines Static and/or dynamic air-gap irregularities Rub between the rotor and the stator

Faults in three-phase induction machines produce one or more of the following symptoms: Unbalanced back emf and line currents Increased torque pulsation Decreased average torque Increased losses and reduction of efficiency Excessive heating Disturbances in the current, voltage or flux waveforms Industrial surveys have reported that the percentage of failures by components in induction machines is typically: bearing related (40 %), stator related (38 %), rotor related (10%), and others (12 %) [11]. Several methods and techniques can be used to detect three-phase induction machine faults. Some of these methods are described in details in the literature [5]-[10]. Certainly among these, MCSA is a well-known and reliable approach for the detection of faults in any three-phase induction machine through the different signatures over stator current signals [7]-[12]. The fault classification for the three-phase induction machines has been already presented in several publications [11], [12], [13]. If the interest is concentrated on electrical faults, it has to be related to the stator windings and to the rotor electrical configuration, considering mainly the squirrel-cage structure that represents more than 99% of the induction machine manufacturing over the last ten years. Then, it is interesting to note that each electrical fault has influence on both electrical and mechanical variables that can be measured around the three-phase induction machine. II. THE MOTOR CURRENT SIGNATURE ANALYSIS (MCSA) The mechanical stresses mainly caused by several startups can produce losses of metal or even breakage in rotor bars for induction machines. Often, the machine can still operate but the detection of the failure and the assessment of its severity lead to the possibility of condition-based

I. INTRODUCTION The monitoring and diagnosis of electrical machines have been under focus for at least the last twenty years with a special interest in three-phase squirrel-cage induction machines [1], [2]. At this time, the motor current signature analysis (MCSA) was the first attempt to detect electrical and mechanical faults with the so-called semi-invasive and low cost sensors [3]-[6]. In a recent past, the dedicated monitoring software was emerging from the limbos since they were mainly related to microcomputer and data acquisition board progresses. Nowadays, the techniques have been improved [7]-[10] even reaching a high level of maturity and some of them have been implemented in industrial context. As the both electrical and mechanical faults are concerned, many sources show that rotor faults, bearing faults and stator insulation breakdowns give the majority of machine failures. For small power induction machines, the stator winding insulation degradation is one of the major drawbacks leading to definitive failure. On the other hand, the three-phase induction machine can operate under asymmetrical stator and/or rotor-winding connections: Broken rotor bars Broken end-rings Inter-turn fault resulting in the opening or shorting of one or more circuits of a stator phase winding Abnormal connections of the stator windings

0-7803-8987-5/05/$20.00 2005 IEEE.

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maintenance programs avoiding expensive drawbacks. Motor current signature analysis (MCSA) is one of the most widespread procedures to detect this type of rotor faults. In fact, a rotor bar breakage introduces two abnormal lines in the current spectrum far 2sfsupply from the supply frequency line (with s as the slip and fsupply as the frequency of the power supply). The left-side component is caused directly by the fault while the right-side component is a consequence of the related speed ripple. The sum of the magnitudes of these two components was proven to be a very good diagnostic index suitably correlated to the fault severity [11], [14]. A drawback of this diagnostic procedure is the possible confusion with the motor current modulation produced by other events. As an example, pulsating load and particular rotor design cause side-band stator current components in the spectrum. If the load variation frequency is near 2sfsupply, where fsupply is the fundamental frequency and s is the actual slip, the resulting current spectrum is similar to that of a faulted rotor but the two origins can still be distinguished by using some techniques to improve the frequency resolution of the spectrum. Then, the component caused by the load variation and the component caused by the rotor fault can be easily separated. A more difficult issue is that of the particular design of the rotor structure. In large power induction machines, a meshed structure with the same number of legs and poles produces a magnetic asymmetry whose effect is the same of rotor electrical asymmetry. However, in [15] a methodology has been developed to discriminate the signal effect of the electric and magnetic asymmetries in the current component at frequency (1 2s) fsupply. The features of the procedure used to diagnose the number of broken bars are briefly reviewed in [12]. References are made to the machine supplied by a constant frequency voltage source in steady state condition neglecting speed ripple. This allows to consider only the left-side component at frequency (1 - 2s )fsupply introduced by the asymmetry in order to state the correlation between the magnitude of the spectrum line and the fault severity. If a rotor electrical breakage of n contiguous bars occurs, the following relationship holds between the effective value I1 (in A) of the component caused by the electrical asymmetry (1-2s) fsupply and the effective value Ip (in A) of the fundamental component (at the condition of a large initial number N) :

components at the frequency (1 2s) fsupply with quite the same magnitude. Therefore, the number of broken bars can be found as the addition of two components [19] :

I1 + I 2 Ip

n N

(1)

III. ROTOR FAULT DETECTION USING THE STRAY FLUX Certainly, the MCSA techniques are reliable approaches for the detection of faults in any three-phase induction machine through the signatures over stator current signals. However, sensing currents on an already installed electrical machine may be problematic even if not impossible because new equipments have to be introduced in electrical circuit of the machine. Sensing fluxes could avoid the problem because flux sensors may be placed outside the body of the machine and they give almost the same information as the current sensors do. Thus, the aim is to transfer a part of the MCSA knowledge to techniques that deal with flux signals carrying out a kind of flux signature analysis (FSA). For a healthy three-phase induction machine, the rotor structural characteristics can be evaluated from the point of view of the stator and rotor current spectra. The characteristic spectra of the emf induced in both stator and rotor sides are evidently influenced by the discrete distribution of stator windings and rotor meshes. When the initial rotor circuit topology is changed because of a broken bar in the rotor squirrel-cage, the stator current spectrum is also modified. The most interesting feature in the stray flux is its dependence on both stator and rotor currents. These phenomena can be used to find modifications in both stator and rotor circuits. Other types of faults, such as static or dynamic eccentricity or bearing failures, which can modify the mmf airgap space harmonic distribution, can be analyzed in order to study their effects in stator and rotor current spectrum. In order to analyze the information given by the stray flux for the detection of rotor broken bars, an analytical approach has been developed [17]. Indeed, the frequency components of the stray flux for a healthy machine are analytically calculated and compared with experimental measurements. Then, the approach is to extend the computation of the frequency components to a three-phase squirrel-cage induction machine under rotor faults. A rotor squirrel-cage can be replaced by a general mrphase two-layer winding with a single slot per pole per phase (Fig. 1).
Nr 1 2 3 4 5

I1 Ip

n N

(1)

where N is the total number of bars This relationship is obtained by the equivalence between a slip-ring machine with an additional resistance in one rotor winding and a squirrel-cage machine with n contiguous broken bars [16]. The validity of this relationship increases if full-load conditions and large-size machines (the magnetizing current can be neglected) are considered [10]. In [10] and [16], the relationship has been experimentally tested on faulty machines, it results that the faults were underestimated. Indeed, the speed ripple produces emf and current

Fig. 1. Equivalent winding of a squirrel-cage rotor

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The pitch of the equivalent winding is equal to one slot. If the squirrel-cage rotor has Nr slots or bars, the rotor structure can be replaced by a winding with Nr phases. The total rotor mmf distribution Fr(t,x) can be obtained in terms of space harmonics as :

IV. SIGNAL PROCESSING FOR DIAGNOSIS It is very important to point out some elements of the signal processing techniques which allow the analysis of the output signals coming from the different sensors implemented around the test-bed or the industrial instruments permitting to make the detection of defects in the threephase squirrel-cage induction machines. Indeed, the majority of interpretations is based on the frequency analysis and is done almost manually. In the other way, it is a question of analyzing the spectrum of electric signals and giving the interpretation of the harmonics present in this spectrum. If this statement appears simple to most of the power electrical engineer little accustomed to the techniques of the digital signal processing, it is not the same thing when it is necessary to be concentrated in a detailed manner on the problem. On the other hand, in spite of a magnitude resolution of 16bits for the full scale in the acquisition board, it should not expect to have a signal-to-noise ratio higher than 80dB compared to the highest magnitude of the signal which is related to the fundamental frequency of the power supply i.e. 50Hz or 60Hz for grid-connected machines. The electric signal conditioning, in addition to the adaptation of impedance and filter of its frequency bandwidth, requires a treatment in relative value with respect to the fundamental of the observed signal (which is 0dB or 1pu) in the stator current and the stator voltage after location of this frequency. It should be noted that it is necessary to verify that the operating mode is well in steady-state i.e. that the signals of interest are quasi-stationary. Then, there is the difficulty of having an interesting spectral resolution. This resolution depends on the frequencies which are worth while to be detected: - the fundamental allowing to find rigorously the frequency of the grid fsupply - the side-band harmonics right and left around fundamental (1 2.s) fsupply in the current spectrum Then, the required accuracy is primarily related to the minimum slip of the induction machine under test. It is well-known that the rated slip value is smaller as much as the rated power of the induction machine is high (a slip of 5% for a machine of 2kW can decrease to less than 0.5% for a machine of 2MW). The necessary spectral resolution is always about a fraction of 1Hz (typically from 0.01Hz to 0.001Hz) which makes possible to have a relative accuracy of a couple of % for the slip estimation. However, it should be known that the spectral resolution is equal to: - the reverse of the data acquisition time Tacq - the ratio of the sampling frequency fs to the number of samples Ns When the time of acquisition is high and also the number of samples is high, the computed FFT for spectrum evaluation is subject to averaging phenomenon so that the magnitude and the frequency components around the fundamental are affected as shown in the example (Fig. 2) for the current spectrum around 50Hz where the side-band harmonics cannot be observed. To compensate this phenomenon, a windowing technique can be used [18]. Under this condition, it is possible to detect the side-band

cr sin ( N r x s t ) =1 =1 2 (2) with Irvmax the maximum value of the th harmonic rotor current and cr the rotor equivalent coil pitch. The flux induced by the th harmonics in the bth stator coil Fr (t , x) =

N r I r max

sin

is computed as :

2 ( b 1) rs,b, (t ) = max b, sin Nr r t t + p 3

with r the rotor speed in electrical rd/s.

(3)

max b, =
where : : : : 0 : cb : p Nr : s : : Dr : Ns : Ic :

0 Ir, max Nr lc Dr Ns
2

sin cr 2

cb sin 2 p
(4)

stator mmf space harmonic rank power supply rotating frequency air magnetic permeability bth coil pitch pole step number of rotor meshes rotor slip external rotor diameter number of turns for each stator coil core length air-gap length

Then, the frequencies induced by the space harmonics of the rotor mmf in the stator coils can be expressed as :

N f stator = r (1 s) f supply p
with =0,1,2,3,

(5)

The effect of a broken rotor bar can be analyzed by studying the corresponding induced mmf effect in the airgap. Considering that the stator structure is not modified, the frequencies induced by the stator windings in the rotor currents are not modified. On the other hand, a broken bar modifies the rotor cage structure and consequently the distribution of the rotor mmf. This situation leads to the introduction of new frequencies induced by the space harmonics of the rotor mmf in the stator currents given by :

f stator bb = (1 s ) 1 f supply p

(6)

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harmonics and to evaluate their magnitudes and their frequencies with accuracy as shown in the example (Fig. 3).

uring a voltage proportional to the flux derivative with a bandwidth of 50kHz. The test-bed has been designed for testing the induction machines directly connected to the grid. However, the same experimental configuration can be used for induction machine drives with the grid replaced by a voltage static inverter (VSI) and/or variable frequency power supply.

Fig. 2. Spectrum of the stator current without window (41Hz-59 Hz) of the healthy machine at the rated load (2-pole pairs, 18. 5kW)

Fig. 4. Test-bed configuration for rotor fault detection

Fig. 3. Spectrum of stator current with Hanning window (41Hz-59Hz) at rated load of a healthy machine at rated load (2-pole pairs, 18. 5kW)

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS A. Test-bed configuration A specific experimental set-up has been designed in order to perform the measurements for early rotor faults detection (Fig. 4). Three voltage sensors, three current sensors with galvanic insulation and one stray flux sensor are used to monitor the induction machine operation. A magnetic brake, which can be tuned by means of a control unit, has been used to simulate the load on the rotating shaft. Two squirrelcage induction machines of 18.5kW, 50Hz, 380V/660V, 4poles, two squirrel-cage induction machines of 1.1kW/1.8kW, 50Hz, 220V/380V, 6/4 poles and one wound rotor induction machine of 0.09kW, 50Hz, 220V/380V, 4poles are used to observe the behavior of stator voltages, stator currents and stray flux under the effect of rotor faults. These seven signals are used as inputs of the signal conditioning and the data acquisition board integrated into a personal computer (PC). The current probes are realized with Rogowski coils with a typical frequency bandwidth of 50kHz. The voltage sensors are special transformers with a large frequency bandwidth of 5kHz. The stray flux sensor is built around an air coil with several hundred of turns meas-

In the experiment, the stray flux sensor is placed near the induction machine body as a low frequency antenna (Fig.5). The diameter of the air coil depends on the size of the induction machine under test and it has to be smaller than the total height of the machine body in order to cover the measurement of flux in an area as large as the width of several stator slots. Then, the dimension of this coil is somewhat related to the induction machine size. On the other hand, the voltage at the coil terminals is proportional to the derivative of the stray flux and it has a low magnitude and a large frequency bandwidth since the derivation tends to increase the magnitude of high frequency components. Moreover, it is mandatory to perform a dedicated signal processing for this simple sensor which does not detect the stray flux directly. From this signal, a spectra corresponding to the emf induced at the search coil terminals is obtained. B. Test description Different tests have been done to perform rotor fault detection using MCSA and to compare with the alternative of FSA as a proposed improvement. The total number of operating conditions has been set to 10: five for a healthy induction machine and then five for the faulty induction machine mounted on the same shaft. The rotor fault corresponds with 3 consecutives broken rotor bars for the 18.5 kW induction machine, one half-broken rotor bar for the 1.1kW/1.8kW induction machine and a disconnected rotor phase for a 0.09 kW wound rotor induction machine.

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For each mode of operation (no-load, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the rated load), 10 acquisitions of 10s at 10 kHz sampling frequency have been made.

Fig. 7. Spectrum of stray flux derivative (band 40Hz-60 Hz) at rated load of a faulty machine (4 poles, 0.09kW) Fig. 5. Stray flux sensor position

C. Experimental results for the stray flux The stray flux frequency components given by (6), for a dedicated slip value, are almost sensitive to the rotor broken bar fault. These frequencies are around harmonics multiple of 25Hz. The left-side harmonic around the fundamental frequency (50Hz) given by (1-2s)fsupply is particularly affected by the rotor fault in every case. In a first experiment, a 0.09kW induction machine is tested with and without rotor fault. The aim is to observe the behavior of the stray flux derivative under the effect of a disconnected rotor phase which is equivalent to a fault in the third of the total number of the machine rotor windings. The rated shaft speed is 1430rpm which means that the rated slip is equal to 4.6%. In this case, the sensitivity of this left side harmonic at 45.4Hz, given by the difference between the healthy (Fig. 6) and the faulty (Fig. 7) case is observed by a magnitude difference of 31dB. This sensitivity is important and it corresponds with the large fault severity.

In the second experiment, the effect of the three broken bars is analysed for the two 18.5kW induction machines with a squirral cage of 40 bars. The rated shaft speed is 1462rpm which means that the rated slip is equal to 2.5%. The left side harmonic is at 47.5Hz with a magnitude of 52dB for the healthy machine (Fig. 8). The magnitude of the same harmonic increases to reach the level of 38dB corresponding to a sensitivity of 14dB for this broken bar fault situation (Fig. 9).

Fig. 8. Spectrum of stray flux derivative (band 41Hz-59 Hz) at rated load of a healthy machine (4 poles, 18. 5kW)

Fig. 6. Spectrum of stray flux derivative (band 40Hz-60Hz) at rated load of a healthy machine (4 poles, 0.09kW)

Fig. 9. Spectrum of stray flux derivative (band 41Hz-59 Hz) at rated load of a faulty machine (4 poles, 18. 5kW)

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Finally, the effect of an incipient rotor bar fault (halfbroken rotor bar) is analyzed for the 1.1kW/1.8kW induction machine. The sensitivity of the left side band harmonic magnitude can be clearly determined and is equal to 8dB for the machine operating with 4 poles (Fig. 10 & 11) and 16dB for the machine operating with 6 poles in rated operating condition. In this case, the side-band harmonics are hidden in the noise because their magnitudes are too low compared to the signal-to-noise ratio. A confusion of sideband harmonics of interest with other harmonics that are around the fundamental frequency is often obtained (Fig. 12 & 13).
Fig. 13. Spectrum of stray flux derivative (band 45Hz-55 Hz) at rated load of a faulty machine (6 poles, 1.1kW)

The most important signature for a rotor fault in the stator current spectrum is given by two abnormal lines far 2sfsupply from the power supply frequency. The left-side component is caused directly by the fault while the rightside component is related directly to the speed ripple. The sum of the two magnitudes of these components was proven to be a very good diagnostic index suitably correlated to the fault severity for squirrel-cage rotors [4]. In the future, this theory will be extrapolated to the stray flux.
Fig. 10. Spectrum of stray flux derivative (band 45Hz-55 Hz) at rated load of a healthy machine (4 poles, 1.8kW)

VI. CONCLUSION Different experimental tests for detecting rotor faults in three-phase squirrel-cage or wound rotor induction machines have been presented. The stray flux derivative can be profitably used for monitoring three-phase induction machines because it is a pure non-invasive method and it can be easily interfaced to the equipment already developed for the MCSA. It is obvious that the stray flux sensor can be easily implemented in industrial environment compared to voltage and current sensors. Moreover, this technique is very simple and reliable to be used with low cost instruments such as a simple air coil to measure the stray flux derivative and a commercial data acquisition board with low resolution to monitor the signal. Further work is under investigation to extend the proposed FSA technique to induction machine drives. VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors are grateful to the Regional Council of Picardie (Amiens, France) for giving the financial support for this project. This paper is also considered as a tribute to the late Dr. G.B. Kliman who provides us encouragements to develop the FSA technique. VIII. REFERENCES
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Fig. 11. Spectrum of stray flux derivative (band 45Hz-55 Hz) at rated load of a faulty machine (4 poles, 1.8kW)

[2] Fig. 12. Spectrum of stray flux derivative (band 45Hz-55 Hz) at rated load of a healthy machine (6 poles, 1.1kW)

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