Incipient Bearing Fault Detection via Motor Stator Current Noise Cancellation Using Wiener Filter

Current-based monitoring can offer significant economic savings and implementation advantages over traditional vibration monitoring for bearing fault detection. The key issue in current-based bearing fault detection is to extract bearing fault signatures from the motor stator current. Since the bearing fault signature in the stator current is typically very subtle, particularly when the fault is at an incipient stage, it is difficult to detect the fault signature directly. Therefore, in this paper, the bearing fault signature is detected alternatively by estimating and removing nonbearing fault components via a noise cancellation method. In this method, all the components of the stator current that are not related to bearing faults are regarded as noise and are estimated by a Wiener filter. Then, all these noise components are cancelled out by their estimates in a real-time fashion, and a fault indicator is established based on the remaining components which are mainly caused by bearing faults. Machine parameters, bearing dimensions, nameplate values, and the stator current spectrum distribution are not required in the method. The results of online experiments with a 20-hp induction motor under multiple load levels have confirmed the effectiveness of this method.