Empirical Mode Decomposition of the stator start-up current for rotor fault diagnosis in asynchronous machines

This paper investigates a novel approach for rotor fault diagnosis in asynchronous machines. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is applied to the measured start-up current. More specifically, the space vector of the stator start-up current is decomposed into complex intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) in order to analyze the asynchronous machine´s transient. It is shown that in the case of rotor fault a particular IMF arises which characterizes the presence of the fault. The instantaneous frequency and the amplitude of the IMF can be used for an efficient fault diagnosis.