FPGA Implementation of a Novel Algorithm for on-line Bar Breakage Detection on Induction Motors

Preventive maintenance is one of the major concerns in modern industry where failure detection on motors increases the useful life cycle on the machinery. Bar breakage is one of the most common failures on motors and monitoring of this condition is a mandatory task for industries. Previous works on bar breakage detection are based on off-line current or vibration analysis through the spectrum, but their detectability is compromised under certain operating conditions. The novelty of this work is the proposal of a correlation algorithm that combines current and vibration spectra to enhance detectability where other works fail. The contribution of this work is that the proposed algorithm, despite of complexity in computational load, is implemented into a low-cost FPGA giving a special purpose SOC solution for on-line operation, thanks to the development of a special purpose hardware signal processing unit. Several cases of study are presented to demonstrate the implementation performance.