Multi-harmonic tracking for diagnosis of rotor asymmetries in wound rotor induction motors

Most of the research work hitherto carried out in the induction motors fault diagnosis area has been focused on squirrel-cage motors in spite of the fact that wound-rotor motors are typically less robust, having a more delicate maintenance. Over recent years, wound-rotor machines have drawn an increasing attention in the fault diagnosis community due to the advent of wind power technologies for electricity generation and the widely spread use of its generator variant, the Doubly-Fed Induction Generators (DFIGs) in that specific context. Nonetheless, there is still a lack of reliable techniques suited and properly validated in wound-rotor industrial induction motors. This paper proposes an integral methodology to diagnose rotor asymmetries in wound-rotor motors with high reliability. It is based on a twofold approach; the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method is employed to track the low-frequency fault-related components, while the Wigner-Ville Distribution (WVD) is used for detecting the high-frequency failure harmonics during a startup. Experimental results with real wound-rotor motors demonstrate that the combination of both perspectives enables to correctly diagnose the failure with higher reliability than alternative techniques relying on a unique informational source.