Robust and intelligent fault diagnosis techniques for DC motors

Wathiq Rafa Abed: PhD, 2012 – 2015

Robust fault analysis (FA) including the diagnosis of faults and predicting their level of severity is necessary to optimise maintenance and improve reliability of Aircraft. Early diagnosis of faults that might occur in the supervised process renders it possible to perform important preventative actions.

The proposed diagnostic models were validated in two experimental tests. The first test concerned a single localised and generalised roller element bearing fault in a permanent magnet brushless DC (PMBLDC) motor. Rolling element bearing defect is one of the main reasons for breakdown in electrical machines. Vibration and current are analysed under stationary and non-stationary load and speed conditions, for a variety of bearing fault severities, and for both local and global bearing faults.

The second test examined the case of an unbalance rotor due to blade faults in a thruster, motor based on a permanent magnet brushed DC (PMBDC) motor. A variety of blade fault conditions were investigated, over a wide range of rotation speeds. The test used both discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to extract the useful features, and then feature reduction techniques to avoid redundant features. This reduces computation requirements and the time taken for classification by the application of an orthogonal fuzzy neighbourhood discriminant analysis (OFNDA) approach.

The real time monitoring of motor operating conditions is an advanced technique that presents the real performance of the motor, so that the dynamic recurrent neural network (DRNN) proposed predicts the conditions of components and classifies the different faults under different operating conditions. The results obtained from real time simulation demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed methodology in accurately classifying faults and predicting levels of fault severity.