A Comparative Study on Some Fault Diagnosis Techniques in Three-Phase Inverter Fed Induction Motors

The growing importance of power conversion systems and their dependency on the performance and reliability of static converters has motivated extensive research efforts in this field. A variety of different techniques have been applied to detect open-circuit faults in power converters. The present chapter is focusing on the techniques of detection and localization of open-circuit faults in a three phase voltage source inverter fed induction motor. A comparative study is carried out between different detection techniques: the Park current vectors and its enhancement by using the polar coordinates, the mean value of the currents, the stator current spectrum analysis and the measurement of the current drop. The aim of this comparison is to investigate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different techniques and evaluate the performance of each detection technique studied. The comparison study focuses on the time detection, the localization ability and the hardware aspect. To validate these techniques, an experimental setup is developed in our diagnostic group laboratory which consists of a two-level voltage source inverter controlled by a DSPACE-1104, Card to generate the PWM vector control of the induction motor. The obtained simulation and experimental results illustrate well the detection feasibility of each technique as well as the benefits and merits of the performed comparative study.