Proposition of a new method for in-service monitoring of the aging of stator winding insulation in AC motors

A new on-line, nonintrusive monitoring system, able to observe the aging of an ac machine winding insulation is described. The principle of this system consists of detecting small variations of the turn-to-turn capacitances due to the dielectric aging. The authors have performed experiments on accelerated insulation aging as well as on a system able to measure machine winding high-frequency resonance, which depends on turn-to-turn capacitance. First, twisted pairs of magnet wires were submitted to thermal and electrical stresses, in order to establish a connection between the turn-to-turn capacitance with the breakdown voltage and the probability of failure. Then, the changes in the resonance frequency of a simplified stator winding, the "motorette," were measured. Measurements of the currents or of the magnetic field in the vicinity of the machine can be made. The analysis of the experimental data yields information on the turn-to-turn capacitance variations, hence on the insulation aging