Statistical Machine Learning Strategy and Data Fusion for Detecting Incipient ITSC Faults in IM

The new technological developments have allowed the evolution of the industrial process to this new concept called Industry 4.0, which integrates power machines, robotics, smart sensors, communication systems, and the Internet of Things to have more reliable automation systems. However, electrical rotating machines like the Induction Motor (IM) are still widely used in several industrial applications because of their robust elements, high efficiency, and versatility in industrial applications. Nevertheless, the occurrence of faults in IMs is inherent to their operating conditions; hence, Inter-turn short-circuit (ITSC) is one of the most common failures that affect IMs, and its appearance is due to electrical stresses leading to the degradation of the stator winding insulation. In this regard, this work proposes a diagnosis methodology capable of performing the assessment and automatic detection of incipient electric faults like ITSC in IMs; the proposed method is supported through the processing of different physical magnitudes such as vibration, stator currents and magnetic stray-flux and their fusion of information. Certainly, the novelty and contribution include the characterization of different physical magnitudes by estimating a set of statistical time domain features, as well as their fusion following a feature-level fusion approach and their reduction through the Linear discriminant Analysis technique. Furthermore, the fusion and reduction of information from different physical magnitudes lead to performing automatic fault detection and identification by a simple Neural-Network (NN) structure since all considered conditions can be represented in a 2D plane. The proposed method is evaluated under a complete set of experimental data, and the obtained results demonstrate that the fusion of information from different sources (physical magnitudes) can lead to achieving a global classification ratio of up to 99.4% during the detection of ITSC in IMs and an improvement higher than 30% in comparison with classical approaches that consider the analysis of a unique physical magnitude. Additionally, the results make this proposal feasible to be incorporated as a part of condition-based maintenance programs in the industry.