An Adaptive EMD Technique for Induction Motor Fault Detection

Reliable induction motor (IM) fault detection techniques are very useful in industries to diagnose IM defects and improve operational performance. An adaptive empirical mode decomposition (EMD) technology is proposed in this paper for rotor bar fault detection in IMs. As the characteristic fault frequency will change with operating conditions related to load and speed, the proposed adaptive EMD technique correlates fault features over different frequency bands and intrinsic mode function (IMF) sidebands. The adaptive EMD technique uses the first IMF to detect the fault type and the second IMF as an indicator to predict the fault severity. It can overcome the problems of the sensitivity of sideband frequencies related to the speed and load oscillations. The effectiveness of the proposed adaptive EMD technique is verified by experimental tests under different motor conditions.