Fractional Calculus-Based Processing for Feature Extraction in Harmonic-Polluted Fault Monitoring Systems

Fault monitoring systems in Induction Motors (IMs) are in high demand since many production environments require yielding detection tools independent of their power supply. When IMs are inverter-fed, they become more complicated to diagnose via spectral techniques because those are susceptible to produce false positives. This paper proposes an innovative and reliable methodology to ease the monitoring and fault diagnosis of IMs. It employs fractional Gaussian windows determined from Caputo operators to stand out from spectral harmonic trajectories. This methodology was implemented and simulated to process real signals from an induction motor, in both healthy and faulty conditions. Results show that the proposed technique outperforms several traditional approaches by getting the clearest and most useful patterns for feature extraction purposes.