Fault Identification of Broken Rotor Bars in Induction Motors Using an Improved Cyclic Modulation Spectral Analysis

Induction motors (IMs) play an essential role in the field of various industrial applications. Long-time service and tough working situations make IMs become prone to a broken rotor bar (BRB) that is one of the major causes of IMs faults. Hence, the continuous condition monitoring of BRB faults demands a computationally efficient and accurate signal diagnosis technique. The advantage of high reliability and wide applicability in condition monitoring and fault diagnosis based on vibration signature analysis results in an improved cyclic modulation spectrum (CMS), which is one of the cyclic spectral analysis algorithms. CMS is proposed in this paper for the detection and identification of BRB faults in IMs at a steady-state operation based on a vibration signature analysis. The application of CMS is based on the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and the improved CMS approach is attributed to the optimization of STFT. The optimal window is selected to improve the accuracy for identifying the BRB fault types and severities. The appropriate window length and step size are optimized based on the selected window function to receive a better calculation benefit through simulation and experimental analysis. Compared to other estimators, the improved CMS method provides better fault detectability results by analyzing vertical vibration signatures of a healthy motor, and damaged motors with 1 BRB and 2 BRBs under 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% load conditions. Both synthetic and experimental investigations demonstrate the proposed methodology can significantly reduce computational costs and identify the BRB fault types and severities effectively.