Investigation of the Broken Rotor Bar and Inter-turn Short Circuit faults by Search-coil based fault detection

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the Search-coil (SC) based fault detection technique has achieved significant progress and became a high accurate method to identify various faults in electrical machines, such as Broken Rotor Bars (BRB) and Inter-turn short circuit (ITSC). This study will examine the application of both external and internal search coils in fault detection of an Induction machine. A medium voltage level induction motor was modeled using finite element analysis software (FEAS), providing a high-fidelity representation of both healthy and faulty conditions. Signal processing techniques, including Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) were applied to analyze the machine’s behavior in both time and frequency domains. Additionally, the unbalanced magnetic pull phenomenon (UMP) was studied under different fault conditions to understand it’s impact on the motor performance.