A survey of condition monitoring and protection methods for medium voltage induction motors

Medium voltage induction motors are widely used in industry and are essential to industrial processes. The breakdown of these medium voltage motors not only leads to high repair expenses, but also causes extraordinary financial losses due to unexpected downtime. To provide reliable condition monitoring and protection for medium voltage motors, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing condition monitoring and protection methods in the following five areas: thermal protection and temperature estimation, stator insulation monitoring and fault detection, bearing fault detection, broken rotor bar/end-ring detection, and air-gap eccentricity detection. For each category, the related features of medium voltage motors are discussed; the effectiveness of the existing methods are discussed in terms of their robustness, accuracy and implementation complexity; recommendations for the future research in these areas are also presented.