Recursive Singular Spectrum Analysis for Induction Machines Unbalanced Rotor Fault Diagnosis

One of the major challenges of diagnosing rotor symmetry faults in induction machines is severe modulation of fault and supply frequency components. In particular, existing techniques are not able to identify fault components in the case of low slips. In this paper, this problem is tackled by proposing a novel approach. First, a new use of singular spectrum analysis (SSA), as a powerful spectrum analyser, is introduced for fault detection. Our idea is to treat the stator current signature of the wound rotor induction machine as a time series. In this approach, the current signature is decomposed into several eigenvalue spectra (rather than frequency spectra) to find a subspace where the fault component is recognisable. Subsequently, the fault component is detected using some data-driven filters constructed with the knowledge about characteristics of supply and fault components. Then, an inexpensive peak localisation procedure is applied to the power spectrum of the fault component to identify the exact frequency of the fault. The fault detection and localisation methods are then combined in a recursive regime to further improve the diagnosis’ performance particularly at high rotor speeds and small rotor faults. The proposed approach is data-driven and is directly applied to the raw signal with no suppression or filtration of the frequency harmonics with a low computational complexity. The numerical results obtained with real data at several rotation speeds and fault severities, unveil the effectiveness and real-time feature of the proposed approach.