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Abstract A precise detection of the fault feature parameter of motor current is a new research hotspot in the broken rotor bar (BRB) fault diagnosis of induction motors. Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is the most popular technique in this field, owing to low computation and easy realization. However, its accuracy is often limited by the data window length, spectral leakage, fence effect, etc. Therefore, a new detection method based on a global optimization algorithm is proposed. First, a BRB fault current model and a residual error function are designed to transform the fault parameter detection problem into a nonlinear least-square problem. Because this optimization problem has a great number of local optima and needs to be resolved rapidly and accurately, a joint algorithm (called TR-MBPSO) based on a modified bare-bones particle swarm optimization (BPSO) and trust region (TR) is subsequently proposed. In the TR-MBPSO, a reinitialization strategy of inactive particle is introduced to the BPSO to enhance the swarm diversity and global search ability. Meanwhile, the TR is combined with the modified BPSO to improve convergence speed and accuracy. It also includes a global convergence analysis, whose result proves that the TR-MBPSO can converge to the global optimum with the probability of 1. Both simulations and experiments are conducted, and the results indicate that the proposed detection method not only has high accuracy of parameter estimation with short-time data window, e.g., the magnitude and frequency precision of the fault-related components reaches 10−4, but also overcomes the impacts of spectral leakage and non-integer-period sampling. The proposed research provides a new BRB detection method, which has enough precision to extract the parameters of the fault feature components.

Abstract In spectrum analysis of induction motor current, the characteristic components of broken rotor bars (BRB) fault are often submerged by the fundamental component. Although many detection methods have been proposed for this problem, the frequency resolution and accuracy are not high enough so that the reliability of BRB fault detection is affected. Thus, a new multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm based on particle swarm intelligence search is developed. Since spectrum peak search in MUSIC is a multimodal optimization problem, an improved bare-bones particle swarm optimization algorithm (IBPSO) is proposed first. In the IBPSO, a modified strategy of subpopulation determination is introduced into BPSO for realizing multimodal search. And then, the new MUSIC algorithm, called IBPSO-based MUSIC, is proposed by replacing the fixed-step traversal search with IBPSO. Meanwhile, a simulation signal is used to test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results show that its frequency precision reaches 10−5, and the computational cost is only comparable to that of traditional MUSIC with 0.1 search step. Finally, the IBPSO-based MUSIC is applied in BRB fault detection of an induction motor, and the effectiveness and superiority are proved again. The proposed research provides a modified MUSIC algorithm which has sufficient frequency precision to detect BRB fault in induction motors.

Current research in broken rotor bar (BRB) fault detection in induction motors is primarily focused on a high-frequency resolution analysis of the stator current. Compared with a discrete Fourier transformation, the parametric spectrum estimation technique has a higher frequency accuracy and resolution. However, the existing detection methods based on parametric spectrum estimation cannot realize online detection, owing to the large computational cost. To improve the efficiency of BRB fault detection, a new detection method based on the min-norm algorithm and least square estimation is proposed in this paper. First, the stator current is filtered using a band-pass filter and divided into short overlapped data windows. The min-norm algorithm is then applied to determine the frequencies of the fundamental and fault characteristic components with each overlapped data window. Next, based on the frequency values obtained, a model of the fault current signal is constructed. Subsequently, a linear least squares problem solved through singular value decomposition is designed to estimate the amplitudes and phases of the related components. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a simulated current and an actual motor, the results of which indicate that, not only parametric spectrum estimation technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]