FPGA-based online detection of multiple combined faults in induction motors through information entropy and fuzzy inference

The development of monitoring systems for rotating machines is the ability to accurately detect different faults in an incipient state. The most popular rotating machine in industry is the squirrel-cage induction motor, and the failure on such motors may have severe consequences in costs, product quality, and safety. Most of the condition-monitoring techniques for induction motors focus on a single specific fault. The identification of two or more combined faults has been rarely considered, in spite of being a very usual situation in real rotary machines. On the other hand, information entropy is a signal processing technique that has recently proved its suitability for fault detection on induction motors, and fuzzy logic analysis has extensively been used in combination with several processing techniques in improving the diagnosis of a single isolated fault. The contribution of this paper is a novel methodology that is suitable for hardware implementation, which merges information entropy analysis with fuzzy logic inference to identify faults like bearing defects, unbalance, broken rotor bars, and combinations of faults by analyzing one phase of the induction motor steady-state current signal. The proposed methodology shows satisfactory results that prove its suitability for online detection of single and multiple combined faults in an automatic way through its hardware implementation in a field programmable gate array device. © 2006 IEEE.

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