Gabor and the Wigner-Ville transforms for broken rotor bars detection in induction motors

Induction Motors are subjected to unavoidable stresses that create failures in their different parts and result in substantial cost penalties. An effective incipient fault detection technique can reduce the maintenance expenses by preventing high cost failures and unscheduled downtimes. Broken rotor bars (BRB) is the most common rotor-related failure, and the startup transient is suitable for their detection. Therefore, several time-frequency representations have been proposed for this aim. This paper presents a performance comparison between the Gabor transform and the Wigner-Ville with a Choi-Williams kernel (WVD-CW) transform for broken rotor bar detection in induction motors. Preliminary results show that WVD-CW has better time-frequency resolution than the Gabor transform ensuring the BRB fault detection with high certainty.