Diagnosis of Interturn Faults in PMSMs Operating Under Nonstationary Conditions by Applying Order Tracking Filtering

Interturn faults in permanent magnet synchronous machines may have very harmful effects if not early identified. This study deals with the detection of such faults when the machine operates under varying speed conditions. The performance of two methods is analyzed and compared, i.e., the analysis of the third harmonic of the stator currents and the first one of the zero-sequence voltage components. The Vold-Kalman filtering order tracking algorithm is introduced and applied to track the harmonics of interest when the machine operates under a wide speed range and different load levels. This study also presents two reliable fault indicators especially focused to detect stator winding interturn faults under nonstationary speed conditions. Experimental results endorse the methodology proposed, showing its potential to carry out a reliable fault diagnosis scheme.