IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO.
6, DECEMBER 2003
Current Signature Analysis of Induction Motor
Mechanical Faults by Wavelet Packet Decomposition
Zhongming Ye, Member, IEEE, Bin Wu, Senior Member, IEEE, and Alireza Sadeghian, Member, IEEE
Abstract—This paper presents a novel approach to induction
motor current signature analysis based on wavelet packet decom-
position (WPD) of the stator current. The novelty of the proposed
method lies in the fact that by using WPD method the inherent non-
stationary nature of stator current can be accurately considered.
The key characteristics of the proposed method are its ability to
provide feature representations of multiple frequency resolutions
for faulty modes, ability to clearly differentiate between healthy
and faulty conditions, and its applicability to nonstationary signals.
Successful implementation of the system for two types of faults,
i.e., rotor bar breakage and air-gap eccentricity is demonstrated
here. The results are validated based on both simulation and ex-
periments of a 5-hp induction motor.
Index Terms—Air-gap eccentricity, induction motor, mechan-
ical fault, rotor bar, stator current signature analysis, wavelet
packet decomposition (WPD).
I. INTRODUCTION
A S the backbone of modern industry, induction motors are
virtually used in every industry. Online fault diagnostics
of induction motors are very important to ensure safe operation,
timely maintenance, increased operation reliability, and preven-
tive rescue especially in high power applications. The induction
motor faults are generally classified as either mechanical or in-
sulation system faults. Common mechanical faults include rotor
bar breakage, rotor end ring cracking, static and/or dynamic
air-gap irregularities, stator winding faults, bent shaft, misalign-
ment, and bearing gearbox failures. Statistical data show that the
mechanical faults are responsible for more than 95% of all fail-
ures [1]–[7].
There are different methods for the detection of mechanical
faults. Typical examples as related to this may include detection
of air-gap eccentricity, shaft and bearing faults by monitoring
the vibration signal [6] or by analyzing the lubricating oil
debris in the case of latter fault; and detection of stator winding
faults means of searching coils that measure the leakage
flux along the shaft [3]. Other diagnostic methods include
acoustic noise analysis, temperature measurement, infrared
measurement, radio frequency emission monitoring, partial
discharge measurement and motor current signature analysis
(MCSA) [1], [2], [7], [8]. Among all these methods, MCSA is
Manuscript received January 7, 2002; revised December 11, 2002. Abstract
published on the Internet September 17, 2003.
Z. Ye was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ry-
erson University, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada. He is now with the Depart-
ment of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University, Kingston,
ON K7L 3N6, Canada (e-mail: zhongming.ye@ece.queensu.ca).
B. Wu and A. Sadeghian are with Ryerson University, Toronto, ON M5B
2K3, Canada (e-mail: asadeghi@acs.ryerson.ca).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2003.819682
0278-0046/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
1217
one of the most popular used methods because of the following
reasons. Firstly, it is noninvasive. The stator current can be
detected from the terminals. Secondly, it can be measured
online therefore makes online detection possible. Thirdly, most
of the mechanical and electrical faults can be detected by this
method. The mechanism of MCSA can be explained as below.
The occurrence of motor mechanical faults usually results
in an asymmetry in the windings and eccentricity of air gap,
which lead to a change in the air-gap space harmonics distri-
bution. This abnormality exhibits itself in the spectrum of the
stator current as unusual harmonics. The current spectrum can
be obtained through fast Fourier transform (FFT) of the stator
current under steady-state conditions. Fig. 1(a) and (b) depict,
respectively, the stator current waveform and spectrum around
the fundamental component for a three-phase induction motor
with two broken rotor bars. The low sideband harmonic com-
ponent around 60 Hz is caused by the rotor bar breakage and it
does not appear in a healthy motor [Fig. 1(c) and (d)]. The fre-
quency of this component is given by
(1)
where is the slip frequency of the induction motor and is
the fundmanetal frequency.
Fault detection and the diagnostic system of induction
motors include at least two important parts: feature extraction
and classification. The goal of feature extraction is to extract
features which are related to specific fault modes. Usually
the features are obtained by processing the spectrum of stator
current of the induction motors using FFT. Other possible
methods include wavelet transform and short-time Fourier
transform (STFT). The goal of classification is to classify faulty
mode from normal mode and different fault modes. Artificial
intelligence (AI), for instance, expert system and artificial
neural network, are often used. Much work has been reported
in the literature on AI-based fault detection and diagnostic
systems [3], [4], [6]–[8]. Most of the published methods are
based on the features obtained by FFT spectrum. Unfortunately,
not much work is reported on the feature extraction methods
which can be very important for the performance of the whole
diagnostic system.
The task of distinguishing faulty conditions from normal con-
ditions based on the resultant FFT spectrum can be done accu-
rately as long as the signals are stationary, the induction mo-
tors are run around full-load condition, and the terminal volt-
ages are sinusoidal. The stator current, however, is a nonsta-
tionary signal whose properties vary with the time-variant oper-
1218
(a)
(c)
Fig. 1. Stator current waveforms and spectrum around 60 Hz, for healthy and faulty induction motor at speed of 1749 r/min. (a) Stator current waveform of a
healthy induction motor. (b) Corresponding spectrum around the fundamental frequency. (c) Stator current waveform for faulty induction motor with two broken
rotor bars. (d) Corresponding spectrum around fundamental frequency.
ating conditions of the motors such as fluctuations in load torque
and power supply. To remedy the problems associated with time
variations, STFT, which is a very useful time-frequency local-
ization tool, is usually used. However, STFT is only applicable
where the low-pass window function can be suitably chosen and
well localized. To this end, a fixed-width window for all fre-
quency components is usually used by this approach and, there-
fore, STFT cannot provide either multiple frequency resolution
or temporal resolution [9], [10].
The importance of a study on new feature extraction methods
also arises from the two requirements from the current industry
applications. Firstly, most of the induction motors are powered
from power electronics equipment, which generate a lot of har-
monics. These harmonics make the FFT-based feature extrac-
tion difficult for online detection. Secondly, for offline detection
and the diagnostic system of large induction motors, it is expen-
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003
(b)
(d)
sive to run the motor at full-load conditions. While the features
obtained from light-load conditions normally cannot ensure an
accurate classification. One method is to do the detection and di-
agnosis during startup. However, the FFT method is incapable
for such transient signals. Only the wavelet-based method can
be used in these cases.
Wavelets are mathematical tools that have recently emerged
for applications such as waveform representations and segmen-
tations, time-frequency analysis, detection of irregularities, fea-
ture extractions, and compression of digital data. The popu-
larity of wavelets is due to properties such as the dilation prop-
erty that can be used to adjust the width of the frequency band
along with the location of its center frequency, and the transla-
tion property that can be used to automatically zoom in and out
in order to locate the positions of high-frequency and low-fre-
quency changes. However, the data obtained from wavelet trans-
YE et al.: CURRENT SIGNATURE ANALYSIS OF INDUCTION MOTOR MECHANICAL FAULTS BY WPD
form cannot be used for feature extraction unless by further FFT
analysis, which increases the complexity of the algorithm.
This paper proposes a new method for mechanical fault fea-
ture extraction of induction motors based on wavelet packet de-
composition (WPD) of the stator current. Two important charac-
teristics, time localization ability and multiresolution analysis,
make WPD very attractive for the purposes of fault detection
and diagnosis. The underlying idea of the proposed method is
to use WPD to decompose the stator current into the time–fre-
quency spectrum, and then use the results to calculate and to
choose proper feature coefficients which best represent the me-
chanical faults of the induction motor. The feature signatures for
air-gap eccentricity fault as well as rotor bar breakage are inves-
tigated in this paper.
II. WPD AND FEATURE COEFFICIENTS
A. WPD
For any given signal , the discrete wavelet
transform is defined as the inner product of the wavelet func-
tion and the signal, that is,
(2)
where is the signal to be analyzed and is the dis-
crete wavelet function. The original signal can be approximated
with the wavelet functions and the wavelet coefficients
(3)
where is the scale factor and is the displacement. The
wavelets are derived from a so-called mother wavelet by the
dilation and translation factors. The mother wavelet is normal-
ized with zero average and meets the following admissibility
condition
(4)
Applying the wavelet transform to the original signal divides
the signal into two parts, the high-frequency part and the low-
frequency part. The low-frequency part is called an approxima-
tion of the original signal. A series of approximations can be
obtained by reiterating such decompositions. The difference of
the approximations between two successive decompositions is
called the details. The multiresolution analysis (MRA) is an al-
gorithm based on the reiterative decomposition of the low-fre-
quency parts only. The peeling-off process in MRA can also be
defined as decomposing the approximation space into a sub-
sequent approximation subspace and the corresponding
detail subspace . The detail space related to the ap-
proxiamtion space , however, remains undecomposed.
WPD is an extension of wavelet transformation achieved by
means of generalizing the link between multiresolution approx-
imation and wavelets. In WPD, both the approximation space
and the detail space are decomposed further. The trans-
1219
(a)
(b)
Fig. 2. Wavelet packet filter bank decomposition and corresponding binary
tree. h : low-pass filter; h : high-pass filter. Downsampling # operator.
formation of the input sequence at scale can be described by
[9], [10]
(5)
where and represent low pass and high pass having a
finite-impulse response of size .
In Fig. 2(a), an example is shown for such a division using the
conjugation mirror filter banks. The original space is divided
into detail and approximation spaces by the low-pass filter
and high-pass filter , respectively. The resultant detail space
is further divided. The reiterative splitting of vector spaces is
represented in a binary tree in Fig. 2(b), where the binary tree
nodes are labeled by their Depth (a dilation factor) and node
number (frequency factor), and the corresponding space is
denoted as . It has been proven that there are more than
different wavelet packet orthonormal bases included in
a full wavelet packet binary tree of Depth [9]. Each of these
packet has a limitted time support as well as frequency support.
B. Feature Coefficients
WPD adds redundancy to the transformation by expanding
each packet repeatedly. The obtained time–frequency represen-
tation is a matrix containing the wavelet packet coefficients for
all Depths and Nodes. For a signal of length , the total number
of Depths is . The maximum number of coefficients
for one Depth is . At Depth 0, the coefficients are exactly
the original signal. Most of the coefficinets are irrelevant to the
mechanical faults to be detected. Further processing is required
to make these data useful for the intelligent fault detection and
diagnostics using AI techniques such as multilayer perceptron
networks and adaptive neural fuzzy systems.
1220 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003
Fig. 3. Approximation of the fourth-order Coiflet function.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4. Feature coefficients for a small three-phase induction motor with two
broken rotor bars at different load conditions (torques), 16 sampling points per
cycle for 1024 points. (a) At Depth 8. (b) At Depth 9.
Owing to the frequency localization, the WPD coefficients of
different harmonic components distribute at different Nodes of
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5. Difference of the feature coefficients between faulty and normal
conditions for different torques. (a) At Depth 8. (b) At Depth 9.
the spectrum of the WPD. The Feature Coefficient for
Node at Depth is defined in terms of WPD coefficients as
(6)
where is the number of WPD coefficients used for the calcu-
lation of the features at Depth and Node .
For a given frequency component, the energy of the compo-
nent is localized at a certain number of Nodes at a given Depth,
and the strength of the energy depends on the amplitude of the
frequency component [9]. In other words, this frequency com-
ponent can be represented with the feature coefficients at these
Nodes. A set of Nodes from different Depths can be selected
to calculate the feature coefficients that best represent the fre-
quency components caused by the faults of the induction mo-
tors. In the following section, the current signature extraction of
rotor bar breakage and air-gap eccentricity is discussed.
YE et al.: CURRENT SIGNATURE ANALYSIS OF INDUCTION MOTOR MECHANICAL FAULTS BY WPD 1221

TABLE I
MEANS OF THE COEFFICIENTS FOR ROTOR BAR BREAKAGE FOR DIFFERENT LOAD CONDITIONS

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 6. Feature coefficients for air-gap eccentricity at various loading conditions. Circles: normal conditions; squares: faulty conditions with air-gap eccentricity
(simulation results). (a) Node 14 of Depth 8. (b) Node 16 of Depth 8. (c) Node 32 of Depth 9. (d) Node 8 of Depth 7.

III. FEATURE COEFFICIENTS FOR DETECTION OF BROKEN
ROTOR BARS AND AIR-GAP ECCENTRICITY
Dynamic simulations for a 7.5-hp induction motor (param-
eters are given in Appendix A) with and without mechanical
faults can be accomplished using the Winding Function Method
(WFM) [11]–[13] that is a convenient and a fast method for sim-
ulation of the mechanical faults, such as rotor bar breakage, end
ring crack, shaft alignment, etc. The parameters of the equiva-
lent circuits representing the rotor and stator can be deterimined
from the dimensions of the rotor and stator using the WFM.
Any mechanical fault will lead to the change of the parame-
ters of the equivalent circuits. Two mechanical fault modes, i.e.,
1222 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003

TABLE II
MEAN AND STANDARD DEVIATION OF THE FEATURE COEFFICIENTS FOR
AIR-GAP ECCENTRICITY FOR DIFFERENT LOAD CONDITIONS

Fig. 7. Experiment setup. Induction motor and generator: 5 hp, 60 Hz, 208 V,
1750 r/min.

rotor bar breakage and air-gap eccentricity are simulated with

this method.
Although detection and diagnostics of mechanical and elec-
trical faults of induction motors can be done with full load ap-
plied. However, the following practical conditions have to be
under consideration: For an online fault detection system, it is
expected the system can also work when the motor is not run
in rated torque. For offline diagnostics system, it is expensive
to build a test bench for full-load operation for large power mo-
tors. Therefore, a system which can perform diagnostics under
reduced load torque is better. Therefore, the conditions for the
full range of the torque will be investigated, that is, from 0% to
110% of rated torque.
Using WPD, the WPD coefficients of the stator current at
steady state can be obtained. The feature coefficients can be (a)
calculated for all Depths and Node numbers according to (5). In
this paper, fourth-order biorthogonal wavelet Coiflets [11] are
used in the WPD. The approximation of the wavelet is plotted
in Fig. 3. The Coiflets are one family of compactly supported
wavelets with highest number of vanishing moments for a given
support width [11]. For an th order Coiflet, the support width
is and the vanishing moment for the wavelet function is
and the scaling function is , respectively.

A. Rotor Bar Breakage

Rotor bar breakage is one of the most common motor faults.
Several factors may contribute to this fault, such as, hot spots,
sparking and thermal unbalance, chemical contamination,
and moisture abrasion of the rotor materials. As a rotor bar
is broken, a sideband component next to the fundamental
frequency increases in the spectrum of the stator current. Using
the WPD analysis and (6), the feature coefficients for different
load torques are calculated. The mesh plots of the feature
coefficients of the stator current at Depths 8 and 9 are
given in Fig. 4. This presents the simulation case where two
(out of the 44) rotor bars of a three-phase induction motor are
broken. The stator current waveform is sampled with 16 points
per cycle for a window of 64 cycles. The large amplitude of the
coefficients around Node 32, Depth 8, and Node 64, Depth 9,
are corresponding to the fundamental component of the stator
current. As the torque increases, the fundamental component of
the stator current increases which, in turn, leads to the increase
of the corresponding feature coefficients.
At Depth 8, the feature coefficients plot in Fig. 5(a) exhibits
local peaks at the proximity of Node 32. This implies a low side-
band frequency component in the stator current which corre-
(b)
Fig. 8. Feature coefficients for three-phase induction motor with two broken
rotor bars at different load conditions (torques), 16 sampling points per cycle for
1024 points. The y axis is exactly the experiment sequence number; the larger
this number, the larger the torque. (a) At Depth 8. (b) At Depth 9.
sponds to the broken rotor bar fault. As the torque increases, the
node number, which represents the local peak, decreases. Since
the node number is propotional to the frequency, this indicates
that the sideband component of the rotor bar breakage decreases
as the slip speed increases. For light-load conditions, the slip
speed is too small, and according to (1), the sideband compo-
nent is very close to the fundamental component. Therefore, the
feature coefficients are too close to the fundamental to be dis-
tinguished at this Depth. A similar observation can be made for
YE et al.: CURRENT SIGNATURE ANALYSIS OF INDUCTION MOTOR MECHANICAL FAULTS BY WPD
(a)
(c)
Fig. 9. Feature coefficients at Depth 10 for rotor bar breakage. Circles: healthy conditions; squares: faulty conditions. (a) Node 60. (b) Node 61. (c) Node 62.
(d) Node 63.
the feature coefficients at Depth 9 as shown in Fig. 4(b). The dif-
ference of the feature coefficients between the normal and fault
conditions are denoted as
(7)
where and are the feature coefficients for
normal and faulty conditions, respectively.
Fig. 5 illustrates the feautre coefficient differences at Depths
8 and 9 in a contour form. In the contour plot, the dark area
represents a large difference value, while the light area repre-
sents a small difference. As can be seen in Fig. 5, the nodes with
large differences of feature coefficients appear in three lines:
the fundamental components (Node 32, Depth 8 and Node 64,
Depth 9), the left sideband components shifting toward the low
nodes as the torque increases, and the right sideband compo-
nents shifting toward high nodes as the torque increases. The
feature coefficients on the left-half side correspond to
component in the frequency domain and the right-half-side fea-
tures correspond to the component.
1223
(b)
(d)
The obvious differences of the feature coefficients for the side-
band components indicate that these feature coefficients can be
used for the applications of detection and diagnosis of the rotor
bar fault. However, it is noted that for light-load conditions, the
differences of the feature coefficients between faulty and healthy
are not very obvious and the nodes are too close to the funda-
mental component. Therefore, it is difficult to perform a fault
diagnosis for these conditions using the stator current. Table I
surmmarizes the mean values of the feature coefficients for both
faulty and healthy modes of operation of an induction motor with
a synchronous frequency of 60 Hz. Three different load condi-
tions, i.e., light, medium, and heavy are considered, where they
refer the torque of 0%–30% of the full load, 30%–70% of the full
load, and 70%–110% of the full load, respectively. Each of the
statistics mean is estimated from about 20 samples. Table I shows
that normal and faulty conditions can be clearly distinguished
based on the statistical properities of the feature coefficients.
Further investigations reveal that the feature coefficients for
normal conditions approximately follow a normal distribution,
1224
(a)
Fig. 10. Feature coefficients at Depth 9 for rotor bar breakage. Circles: healthy conditions; squares: faulty conditions. (a) Node 30. (b) Node 31.
while for faulty conditions, the statistic characteristics vary with
the load conditions. Table I shows that for different load con-
ditions, the feature coefficients that best describe the difference
between the faulty and normal conditions are located at different
Nodes and Depths. For example, for light-load conditions, fea-
ture coefficients at Depth 10 are better than those at Depth 8, and
the feature coefficients at Nodes 62 and 63 of Depth 10 are better
than those at Nodes 60 and 61 of the same Depth. According to
the results obtained from Table I, small node numbers should be
chosen to detect faults at heavy-load conditions, whereas large
node numbers should be used for light-load conditions.
B. Air-Gap Eccentricity
Air-gap eccentricity is another typical fault related to induc-
tion motors. One of the traditional methods to detect the air-gap
eccentricity is to monitor the behavior of the motor stator cur-
rent at the sideband of the fundamental component, that is,
where is the rotation frequency, is the number of pole pairs,
and is the slip frequency.
Feature coefficients related to air-gap eccentricity are also an-
alyzed here in a similar fashion to those of rotor bar breakage.
It is observed that the large difference between the feature coef-
ficients of normal and faulty motors appear around: Nodes 31,
32, and 33 at Depth 10; Nodes 15, 16, 17 at Depth 9; and Nodes
7 and 8 at Depth 8. Fig. 6(a) and (b) depicts feature coefficients
of Nodes 14 and 16 (whose frequency is half the fundamental
frequency) at Depth 9 for both normal and faulty conditions.
The solid lines in these figures are obtained from the feature co-
efficients using a linear polynormal fit. The feature coefficients
of Node 16 tend to decrease with the increase of the slip speed
or load torque, while the feature coefficients of Node 14 have
another tendency. According to (8), the frequency of the side-
band component next to the fundamental component tends to
decrease as the slip increases. Hence, the feature coefficients
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003
(b)
TABLE III
MEAN VALUES OF THE FEATURE COEFFICIENTS FOR ROTOR BAR BREAKAGE
shift from Node 16 to 14 as load increases. Similar observations
can be made for the feature coefficients illustrated in Fig. 6(c)
and (d).
The feature coefficients of Nodes 7, 8, and 9 at Depth 8,
Nodes 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 at Depth 9, and Nodes 30, 31,
32, 33, and 34 at Depth 10 can be used for detection of air-gap
eccentricity. Table II shows the mean and standard deviation for
(8) the feature coefficients for normal and faulty conditions, respec-
tively. It can be observed that the mean values for normal con-
ditions are much smaller than those of the faulty conditions.
IV. EXPERIMENT VERIFICATION
A. Experiment Layout
Experiments on a three-phase 5-hp 208-V 60-Hz induction
motor (parameters are given in Appendix B) are carried out for
normal and faulty conditions (one broken rotor bar, two broken
rotor bars, and air-gap eccentricity). The rated speed of the in-
duction motor is 1750 r/min. The induction motors used have an
aluminum rotor with 28 rotor bars. The layout of the circuit for
the experiment is shown in Fig. 7. Two identical induction mo-
tors are installed on the same bench where one is used as a motor
and the other as a generator. The shafts of the two machines are
in the same axial direction. A delta-connected capacitor bank is
connected to the output terminals of the generator to provide a
self-excitation current.
YE et al.: CURRENT SIGNATURE ANALYSIS OF INDUCTION MOTOR MECHANICAL FAULTS BY WPD 1225

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 11. Feature coefficients at Depth 10 for rotor bar breakage. Solid lines: normal conditions; dashed lines: conditions of one broken rotor bars; dotted lines:
two broken rotor bar conditions. (a) Node 60. (b) Node 61. (c) Node 62. (d) Node 63.

B. Rotor Bar Breakage
In order to emulate a real rotor bar breakage, first, a hole in the
middle of a rotor bar is drilled, so that it is electrically broken.
Since in real situations nearby rotor bars are more likely to be
broken than remote ones, a second bar which is physically next
to the first broken bar is damaged in a similar fashion to create
the two broken rotor bar condition.
Using the WPD analysis and (6), the feature coefficients for
different load torques are caluclated. The mesh plots of the fea-
ture coefficients, , of the stator current at Depths 8 and 9
are given in Fig. 8. This experiment presents the case where two
(out of the 28) rotor bars are broken, and the stator current wave-
form is sampled with 16 points per cycle for a window of 64
cycles. The large amplitude of the coefficients around Node 32,
Depth 8, and Node 64, Depth 9, corresponds to the fundamental
component of the stator current. As the torque increases, the
fundamental component of the stator current increases which,
in turn, leads to the increase of the corresponding feature coef-
ficients.
In Fig. 9, feature coefficients obtained by analyzing the stator
current of the induction motor at Depth 10 are plotted for healthy
conditions and faulty conditions with two broken rotor bars.
As can be observed, distinguishable differences exist between
healthy and faulty conditions. For healthy motors, the feature
coefficients are constantly small for all load conditions com-
pared to those of the faulty motors, while for faulty conditions,
the feature coefficients are changing with the load torque. In
Fig. 9, the solid lines are linearly fitted to the feature coef-
ficients. The notable difference in shapes of the lines at dif-
ferent nodes corresponds to the variation tendency of the fea-
ture coefficients at a specific node when load changes. For in-
stance, at Node 60, which corresponds to large slip frequency,
the feature coefficients increase as the load or slip increases.
The feature coefficients are, therefore, fit for detecting the fault
at heavy-load conditions. On the contrary, the features at Node
63 are fit for light-load conditions, and for medium-load condi-
tions, the proper Nodes for the fault detection are 62 and 61. The
feature coefficients at Nodes 31 and 32 of Depth 9 are given in
1226 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003

(a) (b)
Fig. 12. Feature coefficients at Depth 9 for rotor bar breakage. Solid lines: normal conditions; dashed lines: conditions of one broken rotor bar; dotted line: two
broken rotor bar conditions. (a) Node 30. (b) Node 31.

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 13. Feature coefficients for air-gap eccentricity. Circles: healthy conditions; squares: faulty conditions. (a) Node 15 of Depth 9. (b) Node 16 of Depth 9.
(c) Node 32 of Depth 10. (d) Node 8 of Depth 8.
YE et al.: CURRENT SIGNATURE ANALYSIS OF INDUCTION MOTOR MECHANICAL FAULTS BY WPD
TABLE IV
MEAN VALUES OF THE FEATURE COEFFICIENTS FOR AIR-GAP ECCENTRICITY
Fig. 10. The statistics of the feature coefficients at some of the
Depths and Nodes are given in Table III. The differences of the
feature coefficients between normal and faulty conditions are
clearly demonstrated.
It is further found that the feature coefficients are related to
the number of broken rotor bars. The feature coefficients for
serious faulty conditions are larger than those of slight faulty
conditions or normal conditions. For example, the feature coef-
ficients for two broken bars are larger than for one broken rotor
bar, and the feature coefficients for one broken rotor bar are
larger than for normal conditions. In Figs. 11 and 12, the fea-
ture coefficients with zero, one, and two broken rotor bars are
plotted versus slip frequency for normal and faulty conditions.
C. Air-Gap Eccentricity
The same motor–generator set is used for the air-gap eccen-
tricity experiment. The induction motor is intentionally placed
out of axis with the generator to make a slight air-gap eccen-
tricity. The displacement is about 1 mm. The feature coefficients
at Nodes 15 and 16 of Depth 9, Node 32 of Depth 10, and Node
8 of Depth 8 are plotted in Fig. 13. The statistic characteris-
tics of the feature coefficients at some of the Depths and Nodes
are given in Table IV for two eccentricity conditions: one is for
about 1-mm displacement and the other is for 1.5-mm displace-
ment. The differences of the feature coefficients between normal
and air-gap eccentricity are clearly demonstrated.
As can be observed, compared to the traditional FFT-based
method, the WPD-based feature extraction method provides
multiresolution presentation with which the features for light-
load conditions can be easier to identify. Although the FFT
analysis for steady-state current is accurate, the multiresolution
presentation facilitates the training of the artificial-neural-
network-based classification network and, therefore, improves
the performance of the fault detection and diagnostics. For
the transient signal, the WPD is inherently superior to the
FFT-based method because of its time localization ability.
V. CONCLUSION
New feature coefficients for induction motor mechanical
faults are obtained by WPD of the stator current. The feature
coefficients differentiate the healthy and faulty conditions with
an obvious difference. They can be used for the purpose of
online noninvasive detection and diagnosis of such mechanical
faults. One of the major advantages of this method is that it can
be used for nonstationary signal analysis. As is well known,
induction motors are commonly used together with the power
electronics drives. The traditional FFT-based MCSA method is
1227
TABLE V
7.5-hp 220-V 60-Hz INDUCTION MOTOR
TABLE VI
5-hp 208-V 60-Hz INDUCTION MOTOR
subject to not only the harmonics disturbance, but also frequent
dynamics of the drives. This method can be used for such
applications. Another advantage is that the feature coefficients
obtained using the proposed method are of multiple frequency
resolutions. The same frequency component can be represented
with different frequency resolution. It is advantageous for fault
detection and diagnosis. This method can also be extended to
other MCSA-based fault detection applications.
APPENDIX A
See Table V.
APPENDIX B
See Table VI.
REFERENCES
[1] H. Toliyat and T. Lipo, “Transient analysis of cage induction machines
under stator, rotor bar and end ring faults,” IEEE Trans. Energy Conver-
sion, vol. 10, pp. 241–247, June 1995.
[2] M. Elkasabgy, A. Eastam, and G. Dawson, “Detection of broken bars
in the cage rotor on an induction machine,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat.,
vol. 28, pp. 165–171, Jan./Feb. 1992.
[3] G. Kliman et al., “Noninvasive detection of broken bars in operating
induction motors,” IEEE Trans. Energy Conversion, vol. 3, pp. 874–879,
Dec. 1988.
[4] A. H. Bonnett and G. C. Soukup, “Rotor failures in squirrel cage in-
duction motors,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 22, pp. 1165–1173,
Nov./Dec. 1986.
[5] A. H. Bonnett et al., “Cause and analysis of stator and rotor failures in
three-phase squirrel cage induction motors,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat.,
vol. 28, pp. 921–937, July/Aug. 1992.
[6] D. Dorrell, W. Thomson, and S. Roach, “Analysis of air gap flux, cur-
rent and vibration signals as function of the combination of static and
dynamic air gap eccentricity in 3-phase induction motors,” IEEE Trans.
Ind. Applicat., vol. 33, pp. 24–34, Jan./Feb. 1996.
[7] M. E. Benbouzid et al., “Induction motor asymmetrical faults detection
using advanced signal processing techniques,” IEEE Trans. Energy Con-
version, vol. 14, pp. 147–152, June 1999.
[8] T. Breen et al., “New developments in noninvasive online motor diag-
nostics,” in Proc. IEEE PCIC, 1996, pp. 231–236.
[9] S. Mallat, A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing. San Diego, CA: Aca-
demic, 1998.
[10] I. Daubechies, Ten Lectures on Wavelets. Philadelphia, PA: SIAM,
1992.
1228 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 50, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2003
[11] L. Xiaogang and H. Toliyat, “Multiple coupling circuit modeling of in-
duction machines,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 31, pp. 311–318,
Mar./Apr. 1995.
[12] H. Toliyat, “A method for dynamic simulation of air gap eccentricity in
induction machines,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 32, pp. 910–918,
July 1996.
[13] , “Simulation and detection of dynamic air gap eccentricity in
salient pole synchronous machines,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol.
35, pp. 86–93, Jan./Feb. 1999.
Zhongming Ye (M’01) was born in Jiangsu, China.
He received the B.S. degree from Xi’an Jiaotong Uni-
versity, Xi’an, China, in 1992, the M.S. degree from
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in
1995, and the Ph.D. degree from Zhejiang Univer-
sity, Hangzhou, China, in 1998, all in electrical engi-
neering.
From 1998 to 1999, he was with the Department of
Electrical and Electronics Engineering, University of
Hong Kong, Hong Kong. From 1999 to 2001, he was
with the Department of Electrical and Computer En-
gineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada. Since 2001, he has been
with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s Uni-
versity, Kingston, ON, Canada. His research interests include high-frequency
power conversion, high-frequency ac power distribution systems, electrical ma-
chine fault diagnostics, power quality, artificial intelligence, neural networks,
and fuzzy logic.
Bin Wu (S’89–M’92–SM’99) received the M.A.Sc.
and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engi-
neering from the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON,
Canada, in 1989 and 1993, respectively.
After being with Rockwell Automation Canada
as a Senior Engineer, he joined Ryerson University,
Toronto, ON, Canada, where he is currently a
Professor in the Department of Electrical and Com-
puter Engineering. His research interests include
high-power converter topologies, motor drives, and
application of advanced control in power electronic
systems.
Dr. Wu is the recipient of the Gold Medal of the Governor General of Canada,
the Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and the NSERC Synergy Award for
Innovation. He is a Registered Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario,
Canada.
Alireza Sadeghian (S’94–M’00) was born in Tehran,
Iran. He received the B.A.Sc. (Hons.) degree in elec-
trical engineering from Tehran Polytechnic Univer-
sity, Tehran, Iran, in 1989, and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D.
degrees in electrical and computer engineering from
the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, in
1994 and 1999, respectively.
In l999, he joined the Department of Mathematics,
Physics and Computer Science, Ryerson University,
Toronto, ON, Canada, as an Assistant Professor. His
research interests include knowledge-based expert
systems, artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic systems, adaptive neuro-fuzzy
networks, and nonlinear modeling.