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Adjustable-Speed Drive Bearing-Fault Detection Via Wavelet Packet Decomposition

Kaptan Teotrakool, Student Member, IEEE, Michael J. Devaney, Member, IEEE, and Levent Eren, Member, IEEE

AbstractAdjustable-speed drives perform many vital control functions in the industry, serving in such diverse applications as rolling mills, variable-speed compressors, fans, and pumps. When an adjustable-speed drive fails due to a bearing failure, it is usually catastrophic. Bearing defects introduce vibration anomalies that alter the current characteristic frequencies. This paper addresses the application of motor current signature analysis using wavelet packet decomposition to detect bearing faults in adjustable-speed drives. Index TermsAdjustable-speed drives (ASDs), bearing-fault detection, induction motors, motor current signature analysis (MCSA), wavelet packet decomposition (WPD).

I. I NTRODUCTION DJUSTABLE-SPEED drives (ASDs) are increasingly used in many commercial and industrial applications, such as pumps, fans, blowers, cranes, and hoists. Since the industry heavily relies on continuous operation of ASD systems, unscheduled down time due to failures of these machines is undesirable and very expensive, particularly when a basic ASD system consisting of an inverter and a motor costs more than twice as much as the motor alone. Bearing faults are the biggest cause of ASD failures since the bearings are continuously rotating and the ASD motors are constantly accelerated and decelerated during their operations. In addition to the fact that ASDs themselves often accelerate bearing failures, high dV /dt in the drive output voltage results in transient currents owing from the motor windings to ground through the bearings via stray capacitances. Such currents have caused inner and outer race defects in as few as one to six months of operation [1]. To protect the ASD investment, predictive maintenance is highly recommended for early detection and scheduled replacement of defective bearings when the ASD can be removed from service.
Manuscript received November 27, 2007; revised June 23, 2008. First published April 24, 2009; current version published July 17, 2009. The Associate Editor coordinating the review process for this paper was Dr. Subhas Mukhopadhyay. K. Teotrakool is with the Naval Electronics Department and the Royal Thai Naval Academy, Royal Thai Navy, 10290 Phrasamut Chedi, Thailand, and also with the Naval Engineering Ofcers School, Thailand (e-mail: Kaptan.Teotrakool@gmail.com). M. J. Devaney is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO 65211 USA (e-mail: DevaneyM@missouri.edu). L. Eren is with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul 34349, Turkey (e-mail: LEren@bahcesehir. edu.tr). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TIM.2009.2016292

Fig. 1. Rolling-element ball-bearing geometry.

Motor vibration analysis is one of the most widely used predictive maintenance tools in detecting faulty bearings [2]. The characteristic vibration frequencies due to various bearing defects can be calculated, given that the rotor speed and the bearing dimensions are available [3], [4]. Motor current signature analysis (MCSA) is a nonintrusive technique used to determine the health of a machine by analyzing the spectral components of its stator current. Initial efforts in MCSA were directed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to provide nonintrusive means for detecting the mechanical and electrical abnormalities in both motor and driven equipment [5]. Then, MCSA was systemically used in the detection of broken rotor bars, insulation faults, and bearing faults [6][11]. Initial MCSA studies utilized Fourier-based techniques in detecting fault-related components in the motor current spectrum. The motor current is nonstationary by nature; consequently, wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) provides better analysis than the Fourier transform under varying load conditions. The wavelet transform has successfully been applied to the analysis of both transient and steady-state power system signals [12][18]. WPD and hybrid methods were then used in bearingfault detection [19], [20]. Bearing-fault detection studies that rely on MCSA, to date, have exclusively focused on line-driven motors. This is likely because of the added complexity of the vibration-modulated drive current spectra in ASDs. Since bearing faults are the largest single cause of motor failures and ASDs are increasingly used in many commercial and industrial applications, this study focuses on ASD bearing-fault detection using MCSA. The stator current of an induction motor supplied from an ASD is analyzed via WPD to detect incipient bearing faults. The

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Fig. 2. WPD lter banks and frequency separation.

motor current of an ASD system is nonstationary since the current changes result from the varying load conditions and varying rotational speeds. Therefore, WPD provides a better analysis tool. There is a linear relationship between motor vibration frequencies and motor current frequencies [6], [7]. The current spectral frequencies associated with bearing faults can be determined from the characteristic frequencies of the bearings mechanical vibrations. Any rotating machine with bearing faults creates mechanical vibrations under operation. These vibrations result in air gap eccentricity, which subsequently produces anomalies in the air gap ux density [8]. The changes in the ux density affect the machine inductances, causing stator current distortion at the vibrational harmonics. Equations for calculating characteristic vibrations and current frequencies are given in the succeeding sections. In this study, three types of bearing faults are examined: 1) inner race; 2) outer race; and 3) cage defects. The vibration frequencies of each defect type are given here. The geometry of a typical rolling-element bearing found in most ASD systems is shown in Fig. 1. The inner race defect vibration frequency fID is given by fID = n BD frm 1 + cos 2 PD (1)

Fig. 3. Frequency rolloff characteristics of elliptic IIR and Vaidyanathan FIR lters.

The cage defect vibration frequency fCD caused by an irregularity in the train is given by fCD = 1 BD frm 1 cos . 2 PD (3)

where frm is the mechanical rotor speed in hertz, n is the number of balls, BD is the ball diameter, and P D is the pitch diameter. Angle is the contact angle of the balls on the races and is zero for ball bearings. The outer race defect vibration frequency fOD is given by fOD n BD cos . = frm 1 2 PD (2)

The characteristic current frequencies fCF due to bearing characteristic vibration frequencies are calculated for the line or sinusoidally driven machine by fCF = |fe m fv | (4)

where fe is the electrical supply frequency, fv is one of the characteristic vibration frequencies, and m is a positive integer for the vibration harmonic index. In the case of the ASD, fe is

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TABLE I COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITIES OF VARIOUS FIR AND IIR FILTERS

the pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) output frequency from the inverter and is mainly composed of the n odd harmonics of fundamental drive frequency ff [21], i.e., fe,ASD = n ff . Thus fCF,ASD = |n ff m fv |. (6) (5)

Hence, the more complex ASD current waveform consists of spectral components of the n drive current harmonics modulated by the m vibration harmonics. II. P ROPOSED A PPROACH In this study, an ASD current analysis via WPD is used to detect ball-bearing defects. The current signal through the drive was rst sampled at a rate of at least twice that of the carrier frequency of the ASD. The sampled current data are then processed in three steps: 1) suppression of the fundamental drive frequency; 2) WPD; and 3) RMS computation. A. System Fundamental Frequency Suppression The stator current data contain ASD system harmonics. The system frequency component of the ASD is the fundamental frequency from the inverter that drives the motor. This fundamental frequency is signicantly larger than the bearing-fault frequency components in magnitude and therefore needs to be suppressed before the current signal is decomposed into wavelet packets. A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is run on the current data to determine the fundamental frequency of the PWM inverter output. Then, a second-order notch lter is used to suppress the ASD fundamental harmonic. B. WPD WPD is implemented as two-channel lter banks with successive ltering and downsampling, as shown in Fig. 2(a), to decompose the notch-ltered current data into wavelet packets. Similar to FFT, the resulting wavelet packets are associated with spectral components [Fig. 2(b)]. The half-band lters H0 and H1 can be selected from various nite-impulse response (FIR) and innite-impulse response (IIR) lter families, depending on the nature of the application. The line-fed motor currents are usually much less distorted than ASD-fed motor currents; therefore, FIR half-band lters may be appropriate in the analysis of line-fed motor currents [19]. In the case of ASD-

Fig. 4. ASD test system setup.

fed motors, IIR lters should be used for better frequency separation. The frequency rolloff characteristics of Vaidyanathan FIR lters and elliptic IIR lters are shown in Fig. 3. The transition band of the IIR lter is much narrower than that of the FIR lter, providing better frequency selection near cutoff regions. The decomposition is achieved using a special allpass implementation of elliptic half-band IIR lters [22][24]. The proposed approach provides better frequency selection and lower computational complexity. The number of multiplications required to decompose captured data (512 points) into ve levels with some commonly used FIR lters and the special all-pass implementation of elliptic IIR lters are given in Table I [22]. C. RMS Computation After WPD, each node, which corresponds to a frequency band, contains wavelet packet coefcients (WPCs). The nodes corresponding to the fault characteristic frequencies can be examined. The WPCs of the nodes can be used to compute the RMS values [19]. The RMS value of each node reects the amount of current induced in the corresponding frequency band. III. T EST R ESULT The ASD test system (shown in Fig. 4) consists of an inverter that is capable of outputting PWM voltage waveforms with fundamental frequencies ranging from 2 to 60 Hz and a carrier

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TABLE II CHARACTERISTIC VIBRATION FREQUENCIES FOR FAULT TYPES

Fig. 5. Current waveforms of the ASD system at 15, 30, 45, and 60 Hz.

frequency of 9.2 kHz, and a 745.7-W 3450-r/min 208-V 60-Hz three-phase two-pole induction motor. Both end bearings are ORS 6203-ZZ-C3 (eight balls). The inner race, outer race, and cage defects on the shaft-end ball bearing were tested against a healthy bearing. In testing defective bearings, the PWM outputs from the inverter at 15, 30, 45, and 60 Hz are used, which produce no-load speeds of 897.6, 1797, 2697, and 3596 r/min, respectively. Characteristic vibration frequencies for the fundamental- and second-harmonic frequencies are given in Table II. The typical current output waveforms of the ASD system are shown in Fig. 5 for the associated frequencies. The current data are sampled at 30 720 Hz (or at 512 sample/cycle for the line fundamental) for 5 s. After notch ltering, the data are downsampled and decomposed into wavelet packets. The downsampled data have a decomposable bandwidth of 960 Hz since we end up with 32 points per power system cycle (60 Hz). The signal bandwidth is halved at every level of WPD, and decomposing the signal seven levels would achieve a 7.5-Hz bandwidth for each node. Typically, 7.5-Hz wavelet packets would provide sufcient resolution for detecting fault frequencies. The coefcients m and n of (6) are selected such that at least two fault-related frequency components fall into the

frequency range covered by the selected wavelet packet. In such cases, the fault-related energy level is increased in the selected band, making it easier to detect. However, the fault frequencies are very high in the case of inner race defect, and only the fundamental (n = 1) is used in testing. In the rst part, the inner race defect, which is the most difcult defect type to create, is studied for the drive frequencies of 30 and 60 Hz. The inner race fault was created by drilling a single 1-mm hole in the inner race. The location of the hole is important, and it is difcult to drill a hole in an exact spot in a hard inner race surface after the bearing is put together. This is why the assistance of the ORS Bearing Company was sought, so that a controlled defect could be placed in the inner race before the bearing was assembled. Table III shows the inner race defect characteristic frequencies and their corresponding nodes. The current data are rst analyzed by FFT for the 60-Hz case. The current spectra of both healthy and faulty bearings are shown in Fig. 6. Here, the inner race fundamental frequency (m = 1, n = 1) should show up around 227.7 Hz. It is evident from the gure that the faulty bearing cannot be distinguished from the healthy bearing.

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TABLE III INNER RACE DEFECT CHARACTERISTIC FREQUENCIES AND NODES

Fig. 6.

FFT results for healthy and faulty bearings. TABLE IV COMPARISON OF RESULTS OBTAINED BY VAIDYANATHAN FIR AND ELLIPTIC IIR FILTERS

Then, the current data analyzed by Vaidyanathan FIR and elliptic IIR lters are presented in Table IV. The RMS values indicate that the healthy bearings have higher energy levels than the faulty bearings for nodes 16 and 31 when a Vaidyanathan FIR lter is used in the analysis, whereas the use of elliptic IIR lters results in higher energy levels in the associated bands of faulty bearings. The WPCs of node 31 obtained with elliptic IIR lters for healthy and inner race defects are shown in Fig. 7.

In the second part, the outer race fault and cage fault results are presented for the fundamental frequencies of 45 and 15 Hz, respectively. A single 0.79-mm-diameter hole was drilled on the outer race to simulate an outer race defect tested with a belt-driven load. At a system frequency of 45 Hz, the WPCs of node 8 of healthy and outer race defects are shown in Fig. 8. Two modulated frequencies of 62.98 Hz (n = 5, m = 2) and 63.48 Hz (n = 11, m = 3) fell on this node. The average

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Fig. 7. WPCs of node 31 for a system frequency of 60 Hz with no defect and inner race defect.

Fig. 8. WPCs of node 8 for a system frequency of 30 Hz with no defect and outer race defect.

RMS values of the WPCs from a healthy-bearing node 9 was 11.0 mA, and that of an outer race defect was 13.6 mA. The comparison of the RMS values between the ASD system with healthy and outer race defective bearings indicated that the RMS values of the nodes corresponding to the characteristic frequencies from the faulty bearing were higher than those from the healthy bearing. In the cage defect case, the bearing cage was deformed between two adjacent balls with a center punch to interfere with normal cage rotation. At the system frequency of 15 Hz, the wavelet packet decomposed data of node 12 of the healthy and cage defective bearing cases are shown in Fig. 9. Node 12 corresponds to the modulated frequencies of 86.97 Hz (n = 5, m = 2) and 87.05 Hz (n = 7, m = 3). The average RMS

values of node-12 WPCs of the ASD with no bearing defect and with bearing cage defect were 23.5 and 29.3 mA, respectively. IV. C ONCLUSION The faults in the bearings cause stator current distortion at the vibration harmonics. These anomalies introduce higher spectral components at current characteristic frequencies and, thus, higher node RMS values. Using WPD, the faults can be detected early, enabling their schedulable replacement and avoiding catastrophic machine loss and unscheduled down time. ASD-driven machines, which produce a much larger set of current harmonic and vibration modulation products than line-fed motors, pose a much more formidable problem in bearing-fault

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Fig. 9.

WPCs of node 12 for a system frequency of 15 Hz with no defect and cage defect. [10] B. Yazici and G. B. Kliman, An adaptive statistical time-frequency method for detection of broken bars and bearing faults in motors using stator current, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 442452, Mar./Apr. 1999. [11] M. E. H. Benbouzid, M. Viera, and C. Theys, Induction motors faults detection and localization using stator current advanced signal processing techniques, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1422, Jan. 1999. [12] S. Santoso, E. J. Powers, W. M. Grady, and P. Hoffmann, Power quality assessment via wavelet transform analysis, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 924930, Apr. 1996. [13] S. Santoso, E. J. Powers, W. M. Grady, and A. C. Parsons, Power quality disturbance waveform recognition using wavelet-based neural classierPart 1: Theoretical foundation, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 222228, Jan. 2000. [14] S. Santoso, E. J. Powers, W. M. Grady, and A. C. Parsons, Power quality disturbance waveform recognition using wavelet-based neural classierPart 2: Application, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 229235, Jan. 2000. [15] W. Yoon and M. J. Devaney, Power measurement using the wavelet transform, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 47, no. 5, pp. 12051210, Oct. 1998. [16] W. Yoon and M. J. Devaney, Reactive power measurement using the wavelet transform, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 579584, Apr. 2000. [17] E. Y. Hamid and Z. I. Kawasaki, Wavelet packet transform for RMS values and power measurements, IEEE Power Eng. Rev., vol. 21, no. 9, pp. 4951, Sep. 2001. [18] V. L. Pham and K. P. Wong, Antidistortion method for wavelet transform lter banks and nonstationary power system waveform harmonic analysis, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng.Gener. Transm., Distrib., vol. 148, no. 2, pp. 117122, Mar. 2001. [19] L. Eren and M. J. Devaney, Bearing damage detection via wavelet packet decomposition of the stator current, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 431436, Apr. 2004. [20] C. Wang and R. Gao, Wavelet transform with spectral post-processing for enhanced feature extraction, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 12961301, Aug. 2003. [21] W. Shepherd, L. N. Hulley, and D. T. W. Liang, Power Electronics and Motor Control. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996. [22] L. Eren, M. Unal, and M. J. Devaney, Harmonic analysis via wavelet packet decomposition using special elliptic half-band lters, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 56, no. 6, pp. 22892293, Dec. 2007. [23] R. Ansari, Elliptic design for a class of generalized halfband lters, IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Process., vol. ASSP-33, no. 5, pp. 11461150, Oct. 1985. [24] R. Ansari, IIR lter banks and wavelets, in Subband and Wavelet Transforms Design and Applications. Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 1996.

detection. Therefore, the detection of bearing faults in ASD systems was studied in this paper. Inner race, outer race, and cage defects were explored. Inner race defect was analyzed by both Vaidyanathan FIR and elliptic IIR lters to show that ner frequency separation of elliptic IIR lters is required in the current signature analysis of ASDs. The other two fault types were analyzed by elliptic IIR lters. The comparisons of the RMS values of fault-associated nodes suggested that the nodes RMS values of the healthy ASD system are lower than those of the ASD system with faulty bearings when elliptic IIR lters are used in the analysis. This method can also be incorporated into commercially available industrial circuit monitors with no additional hardware costs. With the proposed method, predictive maintenance can be performed, and the incidence of costly ASD failures can signicantly be reduced. R EFERENCES
[1] D. Busse, J. Erdman, R. Kerkman, D. Schlegel, and G. Skibinski, Characteristics of shaft voltage and bearing currents, IEEE Ind. Appl. Mag., vol. 3, no. 6, pp. 2132, Nov./Dec. 1997. [2] B. K. N. Rao, Handbook of Condition Monitoring. Oxford, U.K.: Elsevier, 1996. [3] R. A. Collacott, Vibration Monitoring and Diagnosis. New York: Wiley, 1979. [4] T. A. Harris, Rolling Bearing Analysis, 4th ed. New York: Wiley, 2001. [5] R. C. Kryter and H. D. Haynes, Condition monitoring of machinery using motor current signature analysis, Sound Vib., vol. 23, no. 9, pp. 1421, Sep. 1989. [6] C. M. Riley, B. K. Lin, T. G. Habetler, and R. R. Schoen, A method for sensorless on-line vibration monitoring of induction machines, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 12401245, Nov./Dec. 1998. [7] C. M. Riley, B. K. Lin, T. G. Habetler, and G. B. Kliman, Stator current harmonics and their causal vibrations: A preliminary investigation of sensorless vibration monitoring applications, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 9499, Jan./Feb. 1999. [8] R. R. Schoen, T. G. Habetler, F. Kamran, and R. G. Bartheld, Motor bearing damage detection using stator current monitoring, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 12741279, Nov./Dec. 1995. [9] G. B. Kliman, W. J. Premerlani, B. Yazici, R. A. Koegl, and J. Mazereeuw, Sensorless, online motor diagnostics, IEEE Comput. Appl. Power, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 3943, Apr. 1997.

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Kaptan Teotrakool (S05) was born in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1974. He received the B.S.E.E. and B.S.Comp.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1998, 2000, and 2007, respectively. From 2000 to 2003, he was with the Royal Thai Navy, Phrasamut Chedi, Thailand, as the Chief Electronics and Network Engineer. After receiving the Ph.D. degree, he returned to Thailand in 2008. He is currently with the Naval Electronics Department, Royal Thai Navy. He is also a Lecturer with the Royal Thai Naval Academy, Royal Thai Navy; the Naval Engineering Ofcers School; and other universities in Thailand.

Levent Eren (S98M03) was born in Izmir, Turkey. He received the B.S.E.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1995, 1998, and 2002, respectively. From 1997 to 2003, he was engaged in research that was primarily supported by Square D and Ameren-UE. In the fall of 2003, he joined Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey, where he is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and the Associate Dean of the College of Engineering. His research interests include motor condition monitoring and power-quality-measurement-related signal processing.

Michael J. Devaney (S60M64) was born in St. Louis, MO. He received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Missouri, Rolla, in 1964 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1967 and 1971, respectively. Since 1969, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Missouri, where he is currently a Professor. From 1980 to 1988, he was the Undergraduate Program Director for computer engineering. He was with the Power Electronics Research Center in 1987 and served as its Associate Director in 1989 and 1990. From 2002 to 2003, he was the Chair of the University of Missouri Faculty Council. For the past 18 years, he has been engaged in research on power metering and power quality measurement supported by Square D.