J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12

DOI 10.1007/s10921-015-0327-3

An Intelligent Fault Diagnosis of Induction Motors

in an Arbitrary Noisy Environment
Muhammad Irfan1 · Nordin Saad1 · Rosdiazli Ibrahim1 · Vijanth S. Asirvadam1 ·
Muawia Magzoub1

Received: 3 July 2015 / Accepted: 10 December 2015

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Abstract In this paper, an intelligent fault diagnosis system USB Upper side band
based on instantaneous power spectrum analysis is proposed. LSB Lower side band
The instantaneous noise variations and sensor off-sets are EPRI Electric power research institute
considered to be one of the common factors that yield erro- FFT Fast Fourier transform
neous fault tracking in an online condition monitoring and RPM Revolution per mintue
fault diagnosis system. The developed system has the capa-
bility to detect bearing inner race defects at incipient stages
with in an arbitrary noise conditions. An adaptive threshold
has been designed to deal with line current noise ambigu- 1 Introduction
ities for decision-making on the existence of small fault
signatures. The performance of the developed system has Condition monitoring is a process of monitoring the spe-
been analyzed theoretically and experimentally on a cus- cific parameters like vibration, overheating, over current of
tom designed test rig under various loading conditions of equipment for early sign of failure and to forecast the need
the motor. of maintenance before rigorous failure and/or to estimate
the machines health. It could be achieved by visual inspec-
Keywords Bearing faults · Condition monitoring · tion or through sophisticated intelligent diagnosis system.
Intelligent fault diagnosis · Induction motor It embraces the life mechanism of the machine parts, the
different data acquisition methods and exploitation of the
data to forecast the trends [1]. Over the past two decades,
Abbreviations there has been an abundance of research work done in the
condition monitoring field and techniques for diagnosing
ANN Artificial neural network problems in induction motors. As induction motors are often
CM Condition monitoring symmetrical, hence faults normally disturb the symmetry
DSP Digital signal processing of the motors. In most cases, reduced efficiency, unbal-
DAQ Data acquisition anced air gap voltages and line currents, increased space
IPA Instantaneous power analysis harmonics, decreased shaft torque, increased torque pulsa-
IM Induction motors tion and increased losses are the usual symptoms related to
MCSA Motor current signature analysis the disturbed symmetry. The other factors which contribute
PVA Park vector analysis to burning of motors are thermal overloading, overloading
due to undesirable stresses, air gap eccentricity, speed oscil-
B Muhammad Irfan lations, stator winding failure, broken rotor bars, bearing
irfan16.uetian@gmail.com failures and unbalanced voltages [2].
1 Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering,
According to a survey in 2005 by the Electric Power
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 31750 Bander Seri Research Institute (EPRI) more than 40 % burning of alter-
Iskander, Perak, Malaysia nating current (AC) motors are due to failure of bearing [3–5].

123
12 Page 2 of 13
Thus prevention of bearing failures gains importance from
the last one decade.
The earlier work on the motor fault diagnosis via the stator
current analysis has been reported for example in [6–20]. In
a more recent work, iterative method was used to find vari-
ous fault signatures in the stator current signal through stator
current analysis technique. The proposed method provides
the efficient fault detection in the non-linear motor operating
conditions [6]. A novel method to analyze the rotor faults
using winding function approach was presented in [7]. The
theoretical investigations were validated with experimental
results. A fault diagnosis system based on speed feedback
error management for the motors used in electric vehicles
was proposed by [8]. The experimental results show that
the reliability of the fault diagnosis system was enhanced
through proposed speed error management algorithm. A
cross-correlation based fault diagnosis technique was used to
diagnose the eccentricity defects in induction motor [9,10].
The validity of the proposed method was confirm through
real time experiments performed on digital signal process-
ing (DSP) based motor drive. A novel analytical model was
developed by [11] to diagnose the bearing faults using stator
current analysis method. Experimental tests with artificial
and realistic bearing damage were conducted by measur-
ing vibration, torque, and stator current. The obtained results
by spectral analysis of the measured quantities validate the
proposed theoretical approach. Different methods to create
artificial faults in the bearings and classification of various
faults were presented in [12]. Motor asymmetrical fault sig-
natures were identified by [13] through spectral analysis of
motor current signal. Laboratory experiments indicate that
the motor current signature analysis (MCSA) is a reliable
tool for induction motor faults diagnosis. Bearing local-
ized defects were diagnosed using envelop analysis of the
vibration signal. It was shown that the results achieved with
envelope analysis are strong function of selection of cen-
ter frequency and bandwidth [14]. A highly reliable fault
diagnosis system based on wavelet analysis of the acoustic
emission signal was proposed by [15]. A generalized fault
analysis system in multi-phase machines was proposed by
[16].The fault detection and decision making capability of
the proposed algorithm are verified mathematically through
simulations.
An improved combination of the Hilbert and wavelet
transforms to diagnose incipient bearing localized faults is
proposed in [17]. The experiments were conducted on vehicle
bearing and motor bearing to validate the proposed method.
Analysis results showed that the extraction capability of bear-
ing fault signatures is greatly enhanced by the proposed
method. An Independent component analysis method along
with support vector machine was used by [18] for the intelli-
gent fault diagnosis of the induction motor. The experimental
results confirms the superiority of the MCSA over vibration
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J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12
analysis method. An integrated system for motor bearing
fault identification is presented in [19]. The proposed sys-
tem combines the cepstrum coefficient method for feature
extraction from motor vibration signals and artificial neural
network (ANN) models. The results show the effectiveness
of cepstrum and ANN in detecting the bearing condition. In
[20] five neural networks models with a decision structure
are presented to diagnose the bearing faults. The proposed
method utilizes the motor stator current information and the
results show good performance of the implemented model
and its ability to identify the bearing defects.
The reviews on the condition monitoring techniques for
the induction motors as reported in [21–25] indicates that
MCSA is the most suitable non-invasive and economical
method for the detection of the motor bearing defects. How-
ever, MCSA could not reliably detect incipient faults under
no load conditions of the motor and also small fault sig-
natures in MCSA are effected by harsh environment noise
variations.
The instantaneous power analysis (IPA) method has been
used to detect rotor, eccentricity, torque and bearing local-
ized defects, see for examples [26–33]. IPA was used by
[26] to diagnose the rotor faults in presence of time-varying
loads. A theoretical analysis carried out using a linearized
model, complemented with several simulation and experi-
mental results, confirms the validity of the proposed method.
In [27–29] uses the active, reactive and apparent power analy-
sis method to discriminate the various motor faults from
mechanical load oscillations and to diagnose the stator, rotor
and eccentricity defects. It was shown in [30] that motor
power analysis method has much more sensitivity to detect
rotor faults as compared to MCSA. A comparative study on
the MCSA and IPA was performed in [31]. The experiment
results indicate that IPA has more capability to detect motor
eccentricity defects as compared to MCSA. Instantaneous
power analysis method was used to investigate the single
point defects i.e. 1 mm hole in inner race, outer race, ball
defect and cage defects in the bearings of the motor [32,33].
The results indicate that IPA has a much more ability to
detect bearing faults as compared to MCSA especially at
no-load conditions. However, IPA and MCSA are shown to
be effected by environment noise and unable to detect incip-
ient faults which typically fall within the range of (1–2 mm)
[34–36].
It has been observed that the low energy harmonics are
produced due to incipient bearing faults and MCSA proves to
be less efficient to detect low energy spectra especially under
noisy environment [12–17]. The IPA method has ability to
detect low energy spectra but in online testing, it is difficult
to discriminate the amplitude changes due to environment
noise and due to existence of the fault [27–33]. Therefore it
is unlikely to make decisions without considering the noise
variations.
J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12
The environmental noise modeling in an on-line condi-
tion monitoring system has been a practical issue and many
studies have been performed to deal with it. The noise distur-
bances are eliminated in [37] by simply averaging multiple
spectrums. Recently, in [38], Wiener filter is designed to
remove all components that are irrelevant to the motor defect.
The statistical process control (SPC) is used in [39] to achieve
high performance of the fault diagnosis system. The noise
level is determined based on the noise-canceled signal. How-
ever, the proposed method is prove to be computationally
intensive. A classical multiple signal classification method
has been proposed by [40] to suppress the noise during the
fault detection of induction motor. However, the proposed
method is still affected by the low signal-to-noise ratio and
takes long computation time to find many frequencies. To
solve this problem, an algorithm that is based on zooming in
a specific frequency range of the FFT spectrum was proposed
in [41].
In [42] a cross correlation method is used to diagnose
eccentricity related fault components in the stator current
spectrum. The predetermined threshold levels which has
been used are as follow: amplitude less than −60 dB healthy
motor, amplitude −60 to −40 dB tolerable defects and ampli-
tude higher than −40 dB severe defects. In a similar work,
[43] uses an adaptive threshold scheme based on percent-
age of the fundamental current signal. The advanced signal
processing algorithms are proposed in [44] to analyze various
motor faults. In this study, the threshold is pre-determined
based on prior tests before the diagnostic procedure starts.
Although, the statistical performance of the instantaneous
noise and bias are not provided in that study but the suggested
solutions present an intuitive way to design a performance
oriented adaptive threshold scheme for an on-line fault diag-
nosis system.
Notably, the pre-determined threshold schemes presented
in [42–44] could be used to estimate the fault severity but
these threshold schemes tend to detect sufficiently strong
fault signatures to avoid noise interference. Thus they could
not be used to diagnose small fault signatures which mostly
occur at the incipient fault stages.
The main contribution of this paper is to develop an
intelligent fault diagnosis system using instantaneous power
analysis with capability to diagnose the incipient bearing
inner race faults (1 mm size single point defect) in arbitrary
noise conditions. The developed system is equipped with
an adaptive threshold scheme which estimates the instanta-
neous line current noise and bias variations to make reliable
decisions and to avoid wrong alarm and misdetection. The
decision making algorithm of the proposed intelligent fault
diagnosis system is independent of the motor operating
points i.e. torque, speed, line frequency and is applica-
ble to any kind of motor operating in an arbitrary noise
conditions.
Page 3 of 13 12
The flow of the paper is as follow: Sect. 2 gives the the-
oretical background of instantaneous power analysis along
with derivation of the bearing inner race defect frequencies.
Section 3 deals with the theoretical design of an adaptive
threshold scheme based on the noise and bias estimations
of the instantaneous power signal. Section 4 discusses the
experimental set-up and presents the implementation of
the intelligent fault diagnosis system to reliably detect the
small fault signatures and to evaluate the performance of
designed system. Finally Sect. 5 gives the conclusions of this
paper.
2 Background of IPA
During rotation, the balls remain in contact with race ways.
In healthy case, inner race has smooth surface so contact of
ball with inner race does not create any impact. However,
if defect (hole) is created on the inner surface of the bearing
then impact will be produced as the ball pass over the defected
surface. This impact will disturb the air gap between rotor
and stator of the motor. As a result harmonics will be induced
in the instantaneous power of the motor. The characteristic
defect frequencies ( f i f ) related to these harmonics could be
calculated using the information of the rate at which balls
pass over the defected surface.
Under ideal conditions, the instantaneous power of the
motor can be calculated using (1) [32].
Po (t) = V0 (t) I0 (t) (1)
where PO (t) is the ideal instantaneous power, V0 (t) is the
ideal instantaneous supply voltage, I0 (t) is the ideal un-
modulated motor stator current.
However, the presence of defect disturbs the symmetry
of flux between stator and rotor which creates modulation
(oscillation) in instantaneous power of the motor which could
be observed at specific defect frequencies. The modulated
instantaneous power of the motor can be calculated using (2)
[32].
P (t) = Po (t) + mV0 (t) I (t)
    π
cos 4π f e − f i f t − α0 −
  6 
 π
+ cos 4π f e + f i f t − α0 −
 6
π  
+2 cos α0 − cos 2π f i f t (2)
6
where f e is the electric supply frequency, α0 is the load angle
of the motor, m is the modulation index, f i f is the bearing
inner race defects frequency.
Equation (2) reveal that the bearing inner race defects
create modulations (oscillations) in the instantaneous power
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12 Page 4 of 13 J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12

Table 1 Expected inner race

Load conditions Motor speed (rpm) Characteristic defect frequency (Hz)
defect frequencies under various
loading conditions fif |2fe − fif | (Hz) |2fe + fif | (Hz)

No load 1475 118 18 218

50 % load 1140 115 15 215
Full load 1390 111 11 211

of the motor and these modulations

 could be observed at
two sideband components 2 f e ± f i f and one component
appears directly at the vibration frequency, fi f . The defects
in bearing cause sinusoidal modulations in the instantaneous
power signal that reveals the harmonic (defect) frequencies
in the power spectrum. The location of these harmonic fre-
quencies allows the identification of abnormalities in the
bearing.
nature in condition monitoring applications and in this study,
the threshold is derived using the statistical decision theory
[45–47].
The instantaneous power (Pinst ) of the motor, including
the harmonic signals, environment noise and bias acquired
in the data acquisition window W(d), could be described as
follows:
   
The holes of various sizes are induced in the inner race Pinst = A + V I f ault cos 2π m f i f + θ + ω̂ W (d) (6)
of the bearing to create artificial defects. The characteristic
defect frequency ( f es ) related to bearing inner race defects where A is the DC level of the signal, I f ault is the ampli-
is calculated using (3) to (5) and are shown in Table 1. tude of the fault component, f i f is the frequency of the fault


component, θ is the frequency of the fault component, ω̂ is
f es =
2 f e +
− m fi f

(3) the arbitrary noise.
f i f = 0.6Nb fr (4) The statics of the instantaneous power signal shown in
fe Eq. (6) need to be primarily identified for accurate fault
fr = (1 − s) (5) signature detection. The non-ideal signal variations such
p
as bias variations, noise variations and harmonics should
where f es is the characteristic defect frequency, Nb is the be eliminated from the instantaneous power signal to esti-
number of balls inside the bearing, fr is the rotor frequency mate a precise signal statistics. The dominant harmonics
in Hz, s is the slip of the motor, p is the number of pole pairs were rejected by inserting an opposite phase signal using
of the motor. auto-correlation of the reference and measured signal. The
The characteristic defect frequencies for bearing inner detailed operation of the harmonic elimination is given in
race defects calculated using Eq. (3) are shown in Table 1. [42,48,49] and thus is out of scope and not elaborated in this
paper.
After eliminating the harmonics, the remaining instanta-
3 Adaptive Threshold Design neous power signal could be described by following equation.


 
One of the major challenges in designing the intelligent and Pinst = A + ω̃ W (d) (7)
robust fault diagnosis systems is the reliability of the sys-

The probability distribution of the modified Pinst signal
tem to detect the small fault signatures. The intelligent fault
diagnosis system should have capability to detect small sig- in Eq. (7) in the Gaussian noise channel is described as
natures which normally appear due to the incipient fault follows:
stages in a highly noisy industrial environment. Sometimes, 
the noise signature amplitudes are higher than small fault    1 1   
Pd Pinst =;A = √ N ex p − Pinst − A
signatures and the fault diagnosis algorithm used to detect 2σ 2
2π σ 2
specific fault frequencies, mistakenly detects noise signa-
tures as fault signatures since the amplitudes of both are hard (8)
to be discriminated. One of the practical threshold design
considerations in intelligent fault diagnosis systems is how The statistics of the instantaneous power signal in Eq. (8) will
the detected signature can be reliably decided as the exist- be identified if the unknown parameters, the noise variance
ing fault signature. The decision making in intelligent fault (σ2 ) and DC bias (A) are measured. The bias and the noise
diagnosis systems based on the threshold trained to the signal variance must be accurately identified to obtain a high enough
noise variation can evaluate the reliability of the detected sig- resolution in small fault signature detection.

123
J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12 Page 5 of 13 12

The variations of the DC level in multiple trials are prone to

L1 L2 L3
be mistaken as non-stationary noise. Thus, the DC bias varia-
tions were filtered in advance to accurately estimate the motor
current signal statistics. In the motor current spectrum, the NI DAQ 6281 Current Transducers
DC bias is monitored at 0 Hz which is fundamentally caused
Voltage Transducers
by various non-ideal conditions such as noise interference,
DC Level
signal distortion or current sensor offset. An algorithm has Estimation
been developed in LabVIEW to measure and remove the DC
level from the current signal.
The mean square error (MSE) criteria [45,46] is applied Noise Level
on the interference free and DC compensated motor cur- Estimation
rent signal to estimate the noise statistics. The MSE based
noise estimation utilizes the average of the bias-compensated IPA Spectrum
instantaneous power signal (Pinst  ) which is defined as fol-

lows: Power Switching

Fault Signature
Circuit
Detection
1 
N

E N = Pinst = ω̂k (9)
N
k=1
Reliability and
Accuracy Test
The noise variance of the current signal could be found by
MSE of (9) as follows: Design Decision
Parameter
 2 
M S E (∂) = E ∂ˆ − ∂ HMI
      2 
=E ∂ˆ − E ∂ˆ + E ∂ˆ − ∂
Fig. 1 The block diagram of the developed experimental test rig
    2   σ2
M S E (∂) = var ∂ˆ + ∂ − E ∂ˆ = var ∂ˆ =
N
σ 2 = N var (E N ) = N (E N )2 (10)
be performed through cross-correlation between pairs of sig-
nals based on the motor instantaneous power signal Pinst and
where: fault reference signal Pr e f as follows:
   
∂ˆ = E N , ∂ = E ∂ˆ = 0, ∂ − E ∂ˆ = 0.

N
TCC = Pinst (n) Pr e f (n) (11)
E(x), is the expectation of the signal x. n=1
The noise variance of the instantaneous power signal Pinst
could be found from Eq. (10) and a simple algorithm is devel- where TCC is the output of cross-correlation
  between two
oped in LabVIEW to estimate the DC level and noise variance signals and Pr e f = V I f ault cos 2π n f i f + θ .
based on Eq. (10) of the measured instantaneous power sig- The output TCC of the cross-correlation can be used for
nal. This algorithm is further enhanced to design adaptive decision making about the existence of the fault. TCC > γ
threshold scheme for reliable and accurate intelligent fault will indicate the presence of a fault.
diagnosis. The performance of the correlation-based detection in Eq.
An adaptive threshold is derived for the specific fault sig- (11) is evaluated using a well-established statistical theory in
nature detections in the instantaneous power spectrum. The [45]. The probability of the detection of a fault signature
performance of the derived threshold is thoroughly evalu- under the Gaussian noise channel is presented in Eqs. (12)
ated through statistical theory [45,46,49,50] assuming an and (13) [46]:
arbitrary noise condition in the instantaneous power signal.
In order to simplify the threshold derivation, single fault sig-
γ 
nature detection based on a cross-correlation is analyzed in PW D = Q (12)
advance which focuses on the specific fault frequency evalu- ∅
ation in a current signal [45,48,50]. Signature detection can γ = ∅Q −1 (PW D ) (13)

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12 Page 6 of 13 J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12

Table 3 Specifications of DAQ card

Dynamometer
Specifications

Number of analog inputs (AI) 8

Induction Maximum AI range ±10 V
Motor Minimum AI range ±100 mV
Max. scan rate 625 KS/s
Encoder Analog output (AO) 2
AO range 0–4.096 V
AO update rate 2.86 MS/s
Current Voltage DAQ NI Number of analog I/O channels 16,8
Transducer Transducer 6281

Fig. 2 The block diagram of the developed experimental test rig

Table 2 Specifications of the Parameters Rating

test motor
Power 0.25 HP
No. of phase 3
No. of poles 4
Frequency 50 Hz

where γ is the assumed threshold, Q(.) is the Q-function Fig. 3 Bearing inner race defect
(Detail is given in Appendix) , PW D is the probability of
wrong detection,
 PT D is the probability of true detection,
-20
and ∅ = σN .
2

It has been observed from Eq. (13) that, the threshold

-30
γ
( ) could be selected based on the signal noise variance and
probability of wrong detection (PW D ). The PW D is the user
DC Level (dB)

-40
expectation value and should be pre-defined in an intelligent
fault diagnosis system.
-50
It is anticipated that the proposed threshold scheme will
provide a reliable decision-making to detect small-signature
in a noisy environment. A condition monitoring process -60

based on the signature detection performed with reliably

detected signatures through a proposed threshold will lead -70
0 20 40 60 80 100
to more accurate fault diagnosis while discriminating its Motor Load (%)
results from random noise interference signatures. It has
Fig. 4 DC Bias variations with respect to motor load
been observed from Eq. (13) that the adaptive threshold is
dependent on the number of samples (N ) and the estimated
noise variance (σ 2 ). These parameters are independent from
the motor operating point parameters (i.e., rotor speed, total 4 Result and Analysis
torque, and motor specifications). This is a desirable fea-
ture of an intelligent fault diagnosis algorithm applicable for A brief overview of the development of experimental test rig
general purposes. It becomes possible since the harsh indus- for the intelligent diagnostic condition monitoring system is
trial environment impacts are generally reflected in line noise presented in this section. The rig has been designed using
which is measured for threshold design in the proposed algo- the commonly available firm-wares in industry i.e. induction
rithm. Thus the motor condition monitoring process is simpli- motor, Hall-effect current sensor, and a programmable logic
fied without considering various motor operating conditions. controller (PLC), The National Instrument data acquisition

123
J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12 Page 7 of 13 12

(NI DAQ) module is interfaced with LabVIEW® software
to acquire and process the current measurements. Experi-
ments were performed in continuous scan mode at scan rate
of 8 kHz with frequency resolution of 0.2 Hz and number
of samples taken 40000. Hanning window was applied to
minimize the spectral leakages. The block diagram and the
developed experimental test rig are shown in Figs. 1 and 2
respectively. The ball bearing installed on the motor shaft
has the pitch diameter (Dc ) of 25 mm. Each bearing contains
8 balls with diameter (Db ) of 6 mm. The bearing consists
of four parts namely, inner race, outer race, rolling elements
(balls) and cage. The contact angle of the ball with the race
(α) is assumed to be zero degrees. The specifications of the
test motor and data acquisition device are shown in Tables 2
and 3 respectively.
-100
-110
Amplitude (dB)
As the majority of motor breakdowns are due to defects
in the bearing, therefore the detail diagnostic of faults asso-
ciated to the bearings inner race via the proposed technique
is the emphasis of this paper. These types of defects usually
appear due to grease contamination or improper lubrication
of raceways. In this study, the bearings inner race defects
were created artificially and the defected bearing is shown in
Fig. 3.
4.1 Analysis of Bearing Inner Race Defects via IPA
In this section, fault signatures related to bearing inner race
defect are diagnosed via instantaneous power analysis. The
performance of the diagnosis system has been analyzed via
adaptive threshold designed based on the theoretical deriva-
Healthy Motor

-120

-130 X: 18 X: 118 X: 218

Y: -140.4 Y: -139.8 Y: -139.2
-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)

(a)
-100
1 mm inner race defect
-110
Threshold 1 = -139.9 dB
Threshold 2 = -133.97 dB
Amplitude (dB)

-120

X: 18 X: 118 X: 218
-130
Y: -137.1 Y: -136.2 Y: -136.3
-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)

(b)
-100
2 mm inner race defect
-110
Threshold 1 = -139.9 dB
Threshold 2 = -133.97 dB
Amplitude (dB)

-120
X: 18 X: 118 X: 218
-130 Y: -133.8 Y: -132.7 Y: -133.5

-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)

(c)
Fig. 5 The instantaneous power spectrum of the motor for inner race defect under no-load condition at characteristic defect frequencies of 18, 118
and 218 Hz (a) Healthy motor (b) 1 mm inner race defect (c) 2 mm inner race defect

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12 Page 8 of 13 J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12

-100
Healthy Motor
-110
Amplitude (dB)

-120

-130 X: 15 X: 215
X: 115
Y: -138.8 Y: -139.5
Y: -141
-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)
(a)
-100
1 mm inner race defect
-110
Threshold 1 = -139.9 dB
Threshold 2 = -133.97 dB
Amplitude (dB)

-120
X: 15 X: 215
-130 Y: -134.7 X: 115
Y: -137.2 Y: -135.4

-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)
(b)
-100
2 mm inner race defect
-110
Threshold 1 = -139.9 dB
Threshold 2 = -133.97 dB
Amplitude (dB)

-120 X: 15
X: 115 X: 215
Y: -129.1 Y: -130
Y: -131.5
-130

-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)

(c)
Fig. 6 The instantaneous power spectrum of the motor for inner race defect under 50 % load condition at characteristic defect frequencies of 15,
115 and 215 Hz (a) Healthy motor (b) 1 mm inner race defect (c) 2 mm inner race defect

tions discussed in the previous section. The experiments were
conducted under six different loading conditions of the motor
to perform easy comparison of decision results. The DC bias
variations with respect to motor torque variations are shown
in Fig. 4, which indicates that the DC bias increases with
increase of the motor load. Thus, it is necessary to estimate
the DC bias of the current signal for reliable decision making
of the motor status.
The instantaneous power spectrum of the healthy and
defected motor under no-load, medium-load and full-load
conditions of the motor is shown in Figs. 5, 6, and 7 respec-
tively. It is observed from the power spectrum that for the
defected motor under the no-load conditions, the changes in
amplitude value at the characteristic defect frequencies of
f i f and 2 f e ± f i f are very small. However, there is a consid-
erable change in amplitude values at the characteristic defect
frequencies of f i f and 2 f e ± f i f for full-load condition. The
analysis of the frequency spectrum for inner race defect under
various load conditions are summarized in Table 4.

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J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12 Page 9 of 13 12

-100
Healthy Motor
-110
Amplitude (dB)

-120

-130
X: 11 X: 111 X: 211
Y: -141.7 Y: -142.3 Y: -141.1
-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)

(a)
-100
1 mm inner race defect
-110
Threshold 1 = -139.9 dB
Threshold 2 = -133.97 dB
Amplitude (dB)

-120
X: 11 X: 111 X: 211
-130 Y: -135.2 Y: -135.4
Y: -136.2

-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)

(b)
-100
2 mm inner race defect
-110
Threshold 1 = -139.9 dB
X: 11 Threshold 2 = -133.97 dB
Amplitude (dB)

-120 X: 211
Y: -127 X: 111 Y: -128.1
Y: -130.4
-130

-140

-150

-160
0 50 100 150 200 250
Frequency (Hz)

(c)
Fig. 7 The instantaneous power spectrum of the motor for inner race defect under full-load condition at characteristic defect frequencies of 11,
111 and 211 Hz (a) Healthy motor (b) 1 mm inner race defect (c) 2 mm inner race defect

Table 4 Summary of change in

Load level Characteristic defect Change in amplitude Change in amplitude
amplitude values at inner race
frequencies (Hz) at 1 mm defect (dB) at 2 mm defect (dB)
defect under various load
conditions of the motor No load 18, 118, 218 3 7
20 % load 16,116,216 3.3 7.4
40 % load 15.7,115.7,215.7 3.65 7.9
60 % load 14.4,114.4,214.4 4.4 9.5
80 % load 13.2,113.2,213.2 5 11
Full load 11, 111, 211 6 13

The results in Table 4 imply that the bearing inner race instantaneous power analysis method has a strong capability
defect causes some changes in amplitude values at specific to diagnose the bearing inner race defects. However, these
frequencies and the change in the amplitude values are more small fault signatures are buried in the noise and hard to
prominent at the full-load conditions. The results indicate that discriminate the signature amplitude variations from noise

123
12 Page 10 of 13 J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12

Table 5 Performance oriented threshold design under various load conditions of the motor
Defect Motor load Threshold design
size (mm)

k=1 k=2

Threshold 1 PWD Detection Remarks Threshold 2 PWD Detection Remarks

(dB) accuracy (%) (dB) accuracy (%)

1 No Load −139 0.15 85 Reliable −133 0.022 97.8 Misdetection

detection
20 % Load −134 0.15 85 −128 0.022 97.8
40 % Load −144 0.15 85 −138 0.022 97.8
60 % Load −139 0.15 85 −133 0.022 97.8
80 % Load −135 0.15 85 −129 0.022 97.8
Full Load −134 0.15 85 −127 0.022 97.8
2 No Load −139 0.15 85 Reliable −133 0.022 97.8 Reliable Detection
Detection
20 % Load −134 0.15 85 −128 0.022 97.8
40 % Load −144 0.15 85 −138 0.022 97.8
60 % Load −139 0.15 85 −133 0.022 97.8
80 % Load −135 0.15 85 −129 0.022 97.8
Full Load −134 0.15 85 −127 0.022 97.8

-100 4.2 Adaptive Threshold Design for IPA

Noise Variance (dB)

The amplitude values at specific characteristic defect fre-

-120
quencies ( f i f , f e ± f i f ) are used to evaluate the performance
of the designed intelligent fault diagnosis system. It has been
-140 observed in the faulty spectrum that the amplitude value at
the characteristic defect frequency ( f i f ) for 1 mm defect size
is −137, −137.2 and −135.2 dB under no-load, medium-
-160 load and full-load conditions respectively. The overall noise
0 20 40 60 80 100
Motor Load (%) level in the spectrum is observed at −139 dB. Two per-
formance oriented thresholds are developed to detect the
Fig. 8 Noise variations with respect to motor load small fault signatures of 1 mm defect size under various
load conditions of the motor based on the values of the
design parameter (k = Q −1 (PW D )). The fault signature
variations. Thus the adaptive threshold has been designed in having amplitude less than the threshold value is consid-
after-mentioned section to tackle the noise ambiguities and ered as noise. The threshold 1 is defined at −139.9 dB with
to make reliable decisions on the status of the motor.

Table 6 Performance oriented

Motor load Adaptive threshold design
adaptive threshold design in
arbitrary noise environment and Threshold 1 = −139 dB Threshold 2 = −133 dB
under various load conditions of
the motor k PWD Detection accuracy (%) k PWD Detection accuracy (%)

No load 1 0.15 85 2 0.022 97.8

20 % load 0.51 0.30 70 1.06 0.15 85
40 % load 1.6 0.05 95 3.2 0.00068 99.9
60 % load 0.9 0.18 82 1.8 0.03 97
80 % load 0.57 0.28 72 1.18 0.12 88
Full load 0.5 0.30 70 0.91 0.18 82

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J Nondestruct Eval (2016) 35:12
k = 1, PW D = 0.15. The 1 mm fault signature under no-load
to full-load conditions of the motor could be detected at this
threshold level with 85 % accuracy. The accuracy of the sys-
tem is enhanced to 97.8 % by adjusting the design parameter
(k = 2) where the threshold 2 is −133.9 dB. However, the
1 mm fault signatures under no-load to full-load conditions
has amplitude less than second threshold 2 value and thus
will be considered as noise which may contribute to misde-
tection.
Notably, the magnitude of the 2 mm fault signature under
no-load to full-load conditions is greater than first and sec-
ond threshold levels and hence 2 mm fault signature could
be reliably diagnosed with 97.8 % accuracy. Thus the intel-
ligent diagnosis system will reliably detect various fault
levels of the bearing inner race with accuracy levels of 85
and 97.8 % for various load conditions. The performance
of the proposed intelligent fault diagnosis system for vari-
ous design parameters is summarized in Table 5. It has been
observed from Table 5 that the wrong detection probabil-
ity (PWD ) decreases with the increase of design parameter
(k).
It has been observed from Table 5 that the thresholds val-
ues vary from no-load to full-load conditions of the motor
(i.e. threshold 1 varies from −139 to −134 dB and threshold
2 varies from −133 to −127 dB). This variation in thresh-
old is due to the non-stationary variations of the noise with
respect to the motor load as shown in Fig. 8. The reliability of
the on-line diagnosis system in these noise conditions will be
affected if the threshold value is not constant. Therefore, the
variations of threshold levels were covered by adjusting the
design parameter (k). The adjusted design parameter values
are shown in Table 6.
It can be observed from Table 6 that the performance of
the intelligent diagnosis system in arbitrary noise environ-
ment could be chosen as per user expectations by defining
the design parameter (k).
Fig. 9 Probability distribution of fault detection decision errors
Page 11 of 13 12
5 Conclusions
This work proposes an intelligent condition monitoring and
fault diagnosis system to analyze the bearing inner race
defects of induction motors. An adaptive threshold scheme
has been designed to minimize the instantaneous noise ambi-
guities and to make reliable decisions. The performance of
the proposed system has been analyzed theoretically and
experimentally under various load conditions of the motor.
The noise variations from no-load to full-load effect the
threshold definition which has been tackled by changing
the design parameter (k). The proposed threshold scheme
is proven to be an effective mean of providing useful infor-
mation in making decisions for small fault signatures with
theoretically expected performance in arbitrary noise con-
ditions. It has been foreseen that the proposed method will
enhance the reliability and accuracy of the on-line detection
and diagnosis of faults in induction motors. The proposed
system that possesses features like continuous real-time mon-
itoring under various load levels would pave way to the
development of an automatic decision making.
Acknowledgments The authors acknowledge the support from the
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS and Ministry of Higher Education
(MOHE) Malaysia for the award of the Exploratory Research Grant
Scheme (ERGS /1/2012/TK02/UTP/02/09).
Appendix
The Q-function defined in Eq. (14) [42,45] is used to measure
the error probability of wrong detection.
 ∞  
1 u2
Q (x) =   exp − du (14)
2 x 2
123
12 Page 12 of 13
Where:
γa − I f ault
x=  152 (1999)
σ 2 /N
Figure 9 shows the probability distribution curve of the sig-
nature amplitude and noise (assuming an additive zero mean
Gaussian noise channel). The area under each probability
curve is one. There could be two possible errors in decision
making of small signal detection. One type of error is miss-
detection which is the shaded area on the left side of chosen
arbitrary threshold (γa ). The second type of error is wrong
detection which is the shaded area on the right side of cho-
sen arbitrary threshold (γa ). The reliability of small signal
detection mainly depends on how the second type of error
(wrong detection) is suppressed.
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