Modeling and Diagnostic of Incipient Inter-Turn Faults for a Three Phase Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor Using Wavelet Transform

Inter-turn faults in the stator winding of PMSM is one of the major cause of motor failure. Therefore prevention and early detection of fault occurrence are crucial in the industrial field. End winding turns can suffer from mechanical vibration due to electromagnetic efforts. With aging, end winding blocking systems become weaker and turns insulation degrades until its breakdown. In this paper, a modeling and a detection method for intermittent inter-turn fault in PMSM stator end winding is presented. The given fault model is an intermittent inter-turn short circuit in the stator winding. In steady state operation, stator currents and reference voltages under fault condition contain fault information, and will be used for its detection. The method is based on the use of a wavelet transform for the detection of the fault. Simulation and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.