Empirical Mode Decomposition Analysis for Broken-Bar Detection on Squirrel Cage Induction Motors

Induction motor is a ubiquitous machine. In industrial settings, online monitoring of motors´ health status in order to schedule maintenance operations with the goal of damage prevention has become an essential necessity. Broken rotor bar is one of the most common failures in the rotor of a squirrel cage motor. Motor current signature analysis (MCSA) has become a popular method for the detection of this failure because of its high reliability. Recent works have performed the MCSA with a combination of different signal processing techniques to identify the presence of broken bars. In this paper, the MCSA is done with empirical mode decomposition from which a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) is obtained. The extracted features from two of the obtained IMFs form the basis of the proposed classification criterion; these are the samples between zero crossings (SBZCs) and the time between successive zero crossings (TSZCs). The standard deviation from the SBZCs and the TSZCs is used as a classification feature. Experimental results using our method show high accuracy in the detection of a broken and a half-broken rotor bar.