2012 IEEE International Conference on Power Electronics, Drives and Energy Systems

December16-19, 2012, Bengaluru, India

Broken Rotor Bar Detection in Variable

Frequency Induction Motor Drives using
Wavelet Energy Based Method
Jeevanand Seshadrinath, Member, IEEE, Bhim Singh, Fellow, IEEE, and B K Panigrahi, Senior
Member , IEEE
Department of Electrical Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi,
Hauz Khas, New Delhi-110016
Abstract The fault detection of an induction motor operated by
variable frequency drives is a present industrial need as most of
the line fed machines are replaced by power electronic drives,
due to their improved speed regulation and fast dynamic
response. This paper presents a technique based on discrete
wavelet transform (DWT) for diagnosis of the rotor fault.
According to the application, the speed and the load can change
and therefore the amplitudes of the fault signals are modulated.
A support vector machine is used in the detection to learn the
complex relationship between the various frequency bands of
wavelet features to obtain a model which is impervious to such
variations. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy and the ROC
graphs indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method for
detecting the fault.
Index Terms Discrete wavelet transforms, broken bar,
energy, fault diagnosis, vector controlled induction motor drive.

I. INTRODUCTION
Inorder to prevent inadmissible downtimes in industries
and subsequent economic losses, a condition monitoring
system is essential. In inverter fed induction motor drives, the
most common objective is to control the speed of the drive.
The control methods used to perform this task vary in its
complexity and performance. As a result, the specific nature of
the application relates to cost and performance equations. The
advancement in the drive technology has given the choices
that range from simple voltage/ frequency controlled drives to
more complex and efficient vector control and direct torque
control strategies [1]. The vector control [1] (or FOC-Field
Oriented Control) drives, is a method which gives good
dynamic performance compared to conventional drive
schemes. Motor current signature analysis (MCSA) [2-4] is
widely adopted for fault diagnosis schemes in induction
machines. The broken bar in a machine can be related to
sidebands in the machine current signature. The predicted
frequencies are the same for both airgap dynamic eccentricity
and broken bars, but since the sideband amplitudes
corresponding to a particular harmonic number are different,

This work was supported by the Department of Science and Technology

(DST), Govt. of India. Grant Number RP02183.

978-1-4673-4508-8/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

the two faults to be distinguished. For broken bar, these are

, (f is the fundamental frequency and s is the
slip and k is integer number), which appears in the stator
current spectrum [5]. Therefore, the frequency band in which
these changes occur as the fault progresses can be well read.
This has led the DWT based methods to be appropriate for
MCSA. In case of VCIMDs (Vector Controlled Induction
Motor Drives), the stator current spectrum is polluted by
various frequency components and therefore searching
through the fault index becomes an onerous task. In a recent
work [6] a Morlet wavelet based technique for filtering out
additional components has been developed, but it also still
needs the slip estimation. Kia etal [5] have succeeded in
developing a slip independent method, but the results also
show that taking into account a reasonable number of
components related to broken-bar fault, the method does not
apply to wide operating region nor does it address to drive fed
machines. The FFT and the STFT based methods [7], which
basically rely upon slip estimation, are thus not suitable under
such widely varying conditions. Parks vector approach [8] is
also developed which is basically a graphical tool for
diagnosis. Fault diagnosis for drive fed motors has been found
to be specific and therefore the need emerged for separation of
these schemes. The fault indexes which are developed for a
particular drive technology have been tested against the
operating region of the machine for assessing its applicability.
Concerning FOC, the results obtained have been impressive
while analyzing rotor flux [9], which again requires motor and
other control related information [10]. The fault diagnosis
techniques using neural network [11] and other pattern
recognition techniques [12, 13] provide better detection for
motors, and also a scheme based on feed forward neural
networks has been implemented for FOC drives [14].
The existing literature shows that the artificial
intelligence based schemes are more robust and they not need
any information related to machine specific parameters, and so
these data driven approaches find place in modern techniques
for fault diagnosis. The DWT features of a VCIMD have been
extracted for specific window lengths of vibration signatures
of the machine. They include energy, entropy, kurtosis and
skewness. These statistical parameters are of the reconstructed
signatures of the wavelet coefficients for increasing levels of
decomposition and subsequent reconstruction. The support
vector machine classifier has been employed for separating the
features of healthy and faulty machines. The specificity,

2
sensitivity, accuracy and ROC graphs indicate that the
normalized energy value of reconstructed machine signatures
does indicate the fault at an early stage. The wide variation of
load and speed of VCIMD provides an exhaustive dataset for
testing the algorithm. The validation of the technique provides
confidence for application in real time systems.
II. DISCRETE WAVELET TRANSFORM AND FEATURE
EXTRACTION: A SHORT DESCRIPTION
The wavelet transform has been invented in an attempt to
rectify the drawbacks of FFT and STFT based schemes.
Fundamentally, DWT filter banks constitute either orthogonal
or biorthogonal filters. They have to satisfy no distortion and
the anti-aliasing conditions ((1) and (2)) and the filters should
be designed in this manner. They together form the perfect
reconstruction condition. and are the low pass analysis
and synthesis filters, whereas  and are the high pass.
 

A more detailed explanation of design of the filters and
multiresolution analysis is provided in [15]. In this work, db10
(10 tap FIR filter) wavelet has been used for its sharper
separation of frequency bands and improved smoothness[16].
The wavelets give a very nice representation of the signal,
which may not be well represented by the Fourier basis. Any
signal can be represented in wavelet basis as,




Scaling and wavelet coefficients are computed as,

 


Here is the input signal in time domain and is the
level of decomposition. The reconstructed signal from the
detailed coefficients represents the high pass frequency band
of that level. The features extracted from the reconstructed
signatures are described as,



The skewness (Also referred as Fisher-Pearson coefficient

of skewness) measures how much the data deviated from the
normal distribution (It can be positive or negative). Kurtosis is
a measure of whether the data is peaked or flat relative to a
normal distribution. These two parameters depend on the
shape in which the data is distributed. Entropy measures the
randomness of the signal or system. The energy (normalized)
is similar to RMS (Root Mean Square) value of a signal and is
a better way to represent this feature than the general way
without normalization. These features have been extracted for
thirteen levels of wavelet decomposition and reconstruction of
the machine signatures.
III. SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE CLASSIFIER
The SVM (Support Vector Machine) [17] is a kernel based
classifier which defines a basis which is centered on the
training feature set and selects a set of points from this set.
Even though it involves optimization (nonlinear), the objective
function is convex and solution is obtained in straightforward
way. The classification problem can be described as,

where are the training vectors, parameter
b is explicit, is a fixed kernel transformation and is
the output, and is the support vector. The sign of
determines the class to which belongs. The training is
performed to find out the optimum vector (Support Vector)
which forms the maximum margin between the two classes.
Here the two classes are healthy and one with broken rotor
bar. The task is to find the vector, which is the optimal
hyperplane separating the classes by largest margin. Once the
feature space is transformed to the kernel space, then they
become linearly separable in the higher dimensional space.
The objective function can be expressed as,


With the constraints as,

The slack variable and  . 

is the cost parameter. The solution for (11) is a support vector,
which is written as,



 

   



 

where  , are the Langrangian multipliers.

The kernel chosen is a radial basis function (RBF), which
is expressed as,

 

3
The RBF is having only one parameter which has to be
optimized. The other parameter is a cost  which is a part of
the objective function. These are optimized by a suitably
tailored genetic algorithm (GA) [18], which is based on
decimal coding.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL HARDWARE PROTOTYPE
The Spectraquest machine fault simulator (MFS) has
been employed for simulating the broken rotor bar fault,
which is incorporated in the induction machine which
nameplate details are given in Table I.
TABLE I
NAME PLATE DETAILS OF THE MACHINE
Horse power
1/3
Voltage
190 V
Current
1.85 A
Speed
2850 RPM

A three phase induction motor has been run by a vector

controlled drive for ten frequencies from 5 Hz to 50 Hz in
steps of 5 Hz. The machine has been loaded from no load to
above the rated load by means of a gearbox. The tests under
the variable speed-load combination have been performed for
the healthy and for the motor with fault. A total of 50 cases
(10 speeds5 variable loads) constituted the dataset for
healthy and faulty conditions. Figure. 1 shows the hardware
prototype for experiments. As depicted, the machine is loaded
with a gearbox and it is an embedded VCIMD. The
accelerometer is an IEPE (Integrated Electronics Piezo
Electric) sensor which is connected to National Instruments
(NI) data acquisition system. The software (based on FPGA)
has been developed in NI LabView and can acquire data
simultaneously at high rates.

based data acquisition system.

2) The wavelet based processing is the next step.
3) The features of the signatures (energy, entropy, kurtosis
and skewness) are extracted and the feature vector is
formed for 13 levels of decomposition and reconstruction.
4) The training and testing of the algorithm using SVM
classifier by dividing feature set in ratio 3:1.
5) A real coded GA runs in background for optimizing the
parameters.
6) The algorithm iterates until a maximum accuracy is
reached or specified number of generations have
exhausted.
7) Validation of algorithm by dataset outside the testing and
training sets.
8) The performance is evaluated for the testing and
validation phases by metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity
and specificity. ROC graphs further illustrates the
classifier performance using the true positive and false
positive rates.

Figure. 2. Flow chart of the complete algorithm

Figure. 1. Machine prototype for testing

The acquired vibration signature of IM has also been used

for validating the results obtained by training and testing
datasets. The validation has been performed by a different
dataset which is not a part of training and testing phase.
V. SUMMARY OF THE PROPOSED ALGORITHM
Figure. 2 shows a schematic flow of the algorithm. This
can be summarized as follows:
1) The machine vibrations have been recorded by the NI

VI. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Performance of the algorithm is assessed by different
metrics to ascertain its feasibility. As previously discussed (in
Section II), the algorithm is tested for features which is
thirteen dimensional and represents a data window of
specified size. The performance is assessed by different
metrics such as accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and ROC
graphs [19]. The convergence of the GA has been within first
ten generations, which is fast.
The different performance metrics obtained for various
feature vectors is depicted in Figure. 3 and Tables II to VI. On

4
inspection it is observed that the specificity and sensitivity are
almost equal for all four features. For skewness and kurtosis,
specificity (0.63 and 0.73), sensitivity (0.65 and 0.733),
accuracy (0.64 and 0.7316) and AUC (0.6780 and 0.7932) are
low. In case of kurtosis and energy (normalized), the four
performance metrics are 0.9733 and 0.9967, 0.9767 and 1,
0.975 and 0.9983, 0.9911 and 0.9977 respectively. The values
are high and the performance is acceptable. The normalized
energy is performing the best among all the four and so it is
suggested for real time implementation. The convergence of
the GA has been within first ten generations, which is fast.
Figure. 4 describes the convergence of GA for energy and
entropy feature sets.

validation process. A separate dataset constituting features

which are not a part of training or testing dataset is formed.
The size of this dataset is equal to the training dataset. Tables
VII, VIII and IX show the performance of two best performing
configurations for test dataset i.e. entropy and normalized
energy. The confusion matrices (Table VII and VIII) indicate
that the energy features are equally responding to positive and
negative instances whereas entropy has a tendency to classify
negative instances wrongly compared to positive (The false
positive (FP)=45 and false negative (FN)=20). The same is
reflected in sensitivity (0.9778 for entropy and 0.9911 for
energy) and specificity (0.95 for entropy and 0.9911 for
energy) values respectively.

Figure. 4. Convergence of GA for energy and entropy

Figure. 3. ROC graphs for different features representing the dataset

Feature
Skewness
Kurtosis
Entropy
Energy

TABLE II
PERFORMANCE METRICS FOR DIFFERENT FEATURES
Specificity
Sensitivity
Accuracy
0.63
0.65
0.64
0.73
0.733
0.7316
0.9733
0.9767
0.975
0.9967
1
0.9983

AUC
0.6780
0.7932
0.9911
0.9977

TABLE III
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR SKEWNESS
195
105
111
189
TABLE IV
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR KURTOSIS
220
80
81
219
TABLE V
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR ENTROPY
293
7
8
292
TABLE VI
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR ENERGY
300
0
1
299

The sensitivity shows how correctly the classifier responds

to positive (here it is healthy) instances of the feature set,
whereas specificity is for the negative (or faulty) instances.
For normalized energy and entropy, the classifier has high
values for both the metrics. This has to be verified by

TABLE VII
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR ENERGY (VALIDATION)
892
8
8
892
TABLE VIII
CONFUSION MATRIX FOR ENTROPY (VALIDATION)
880
20
45
855
TABLE IX
PERFORMANCE INDICES FOR VALIDATION
Feature
Specificity
Sensitivity
Accuracy
Entropy
0.95
0.9778
0.9638
Energy
0.9911
0.9911
0.9911

Performance has been found to be high and satisfactory

from the results presented. If one looks at the overall
performance levels, by taking into account the testing and the
validation analysis, the normalized energy based feature
extraction and classification is better over the other three.
VII. CONCLUSION
The broken bar detection has been discussed by employing
different features of vibration signatures of DWT to an SVM
classifier. Under various speeds and loads, the fault detection
scheme for VCIMD has been found to perform best under
normalized energy based detection scheme. Developing a
suitable technique by comparing various feature extraction
methods using DWT for vibration analysis is not yet explored
and so it is a useful while going further for real time
implementation. The accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and
ROC metrics provide a complete picture for choosing

5
normalized energy as the suggested feature extraction method
for the SVM classifier based modeling. The GA, which
chooses the parameter of the kernel as well as the cost
function, has been found to converge fast, which also saves
time while developing the mathematical model. The validation
of the method using a dataset of equal size as the training
dataset is again a good indicator of the generalization of
proposed approach for unseen features.

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