Analysis of Torque Ripples of an Induction Motor Taking into Account a Inter-Turn Short-Circuit in a Stator Winding

Despite the increasing popularity of permanent magnet synchronous machines, induction motors (IM) are still the most frequently used electrical machines in commercial applications. Ensuring a failure-free operation of IM motivates research aimed at the development of effective methods of monitoring and diagnostic of electrical machines. The presented paper deals with diagnostics of an IM with failure of an inter-turn short-circuit in a stator winding. As this type of failure commonly does not lead immediately to exclusion of a drive system, an early stage diagnosis of inter-turn short-circuit enables preventive maintenance and reduce the costs of a whole drive system failure. In the proposed approach, the early diagnostics of IM with the inter-turn short-circuit is based on the analysis of an electromagnetic torque waveform. The research is based on an elaborated numerical field-circuit model of IM. In the presented model, the inter-turn short-circuit in the selected winding has been accounted for. As the short-circuit between the turns can occur in different locations in coils of winding, computations were carried out for various quantity of shorted turns in the winding. The performed analysis of impact of inter-turn short-circuit on torque waveforms allowed to find the correlation between the quantity of shorted turns and torque ripple level. This correlation can be used as input into the first layer of an artificial neural network in early and noninvasive diagnostics of drive systems.