Induction motor stator fault detection via fuzzy logic

The online monitoring of induction motors is becoming increasingly important. The main difficulty in this task is the lack of an accurate analytical model to describe a faulty motor. A fuzzy logic approach may help to diagnose induction motor faults. This work presents a reliable method for the detection of stator winding faults (which make up 38% of induction motor failures) based on monitoring the line/terminal current amplitudes. In this method, fuzzy logic is used to make decisions about the stator motor condition. In fact, fuzzy logic is reminiscent of human thinking processes and natural language enabling decisions to be made based on vague information. Therefore, this paper applies fuzzy logic to induction motors fault detection and diagnosis. The motor condition is described using linguistic variables. Fuzzy subsets and the corresponding membership functions describe stator current amplitudes. A knowledge base, comprising rule and data bases, is built to support the fuzzy inference. The induction motor condition is diagnosed using a compositional rule of fuzzy inference. Experimental results are presented in terms of accuracy in the detection motor faults and knowledge extraction feasibility. The preliminary results show that the proposed fuzzy approach can be used for accurate stator fault diagnosis.