Vibration monitoring for diagnosis of electrical equipment´s faults

This paper describes diagnosis of electric faults based on vibration monitoring. Detection and diagnosis of incipient faults are desirable in order to ensure product quality and improved operational efficiency of electrical equipment running off the power supply mains. These faults could appear in any electrical equipment, but this paper focuses on the transformer, dc, three phase and single phase induction motors. In order to perform the diagnosis signals of vibration from the piezoelectric accelerometer are analyzed. This accelerometer is installed on the frame of the equipment. The Fast Fourier Transform is applied to the acquired signals. We observe significant vibration spectrum differences between “healthy” equipment and electrical equipment with faults. The high-frequency spectral analysis of vibration provides a method to detect equipment faults.