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Stator fault analysis of synchronous machines

The stator inter-turn faults can result in catastrophic failure of the electric machines leading to extended downtime of the equipment, increased cost of repair and heavy financial losses in the industries. In the recent trends, online fault diagnosis of the electric machines that arc employed in critical applications has been considered very important since frequent outage of the machines for the purpose of testing cannot he recommended. In this work. diagnostic tools have been developed to unambiguously detect the early stages of these limits in the salient-pole synchronous machines. both reluctance synchronous machine and synchronous machine with DC excitation. Motor current signature analysis. a very useful tool in the condition monitoring of electrical machines. has been primarily used for this purpose.

This study mainly consists of development of theoretical background for the diagnostic schemes followed by the implementation of these schemes on both simulated and experimental machines. For this purpose. detailed mathematical models of the synchronous machines have been developed that can include stator inter-turn faults with desired fault severity. The developed models can also accommodate some structural asymmetries of the machines. These models have been instrumental in testing the proposed diagnostic schemes under ideal conditions. Also. reversible stator inter-turn faults have been carefully created in the experimental machines to test the feasibility of the diagnostic schemes under practical conditions. In order to ensure unambiguous fault detection. a detailed analysis has been performed under various possible abnormal operating conditions of the machines such as supply unbalance. time harmonics and internal asymmetries of the machines.
Initially. certain drawbacks have been identified in a diagnostic scheme based on negative sequence quantities of the machine and critical improvements have been suggested to enhance its sensitivity. However, the modified method fails to detect faults involving one turn short. Hence a frequency domain approach has been considered to detect these faults. As a first step in this direction, it has been demonstrated that the triplen harmonics in the line current of synchronous machines cannot detect these faults unambiguously. Subsequently, owing to the stored magnetic energy in the machine after supply disconnection, it has been observed that the triplen harmonics in the terminal voltages of RSM can be useful for unambiguous detection of stator inter-turn faults. A new and very effective technique of online fault detection. based on the monitoring of some specific frequency components in the field current. has been developed for the synchronous machines with DC excitation. This scheme uses the structural asymmetries of the field winding. Similar results have also been realized using a rotor-mounted search-coil with very high sensitivity. In this work, an instrument has also been devised to implement fault diagnosis on machines using the computational capabilities of digital signal processors.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/2339
Date10 March 2010
CreatorsNeti, Prabhakar
ContributorsNandi, Subhasis
Source SetsUniversity of Victoria
LanguageEnglish, English
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
RightsAvailable to the World Wide Web

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