Condition Monitoring Accuracy in Inverter-Driven Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines Based on Motor Voltage Signature Analysis

Condition monitoring and preventative maintenance are essential for reliable and efficient operation of permanent magnet synchronous machines driven by inverters. There are two types of industrial inverter drives available: field oriented control and direct torque control. Their compensation nature and control structure are distinct and, therefore, the condition monitoring approach designed for the former control may not be applicable to the latter one. In this paper, we investigate the Motor Voltage Signature Analysis approach for both inverter drives under healthy and faulty conditions. Four typical fault conditions are addressed: turn-to-turn short circuit, high resistance contact, static eccentricity, and local demagnetization. High fidelity cosimulation is developed by coupling the finite element machine model with both control drives. The spectral elements of the commanded stator voltage are utilized as indicators for supervised classification to identify, categorize, and estimate the severity of faults. Linear discriminate analysis, k-nearest neighbor, and support vector machines are the classification techniques used. Results indicate that the condition monitoring based on the Motor Voltage Signature Analysis performs adequately in field oriented control. Nevertheless, the utilized monitoring scheme does not exhibit satisfactory performance in direct torque control owing to the nonlinear characteristics and tolerance nature of this drive.