Comparative Study between Physics-Informed CNN and PCA in Induction Motor Broken Bars MCSA Detection

In this article, two methods for broken bar detection in induction motors are considered and tested using data collected from the LIAS laboratory at the University of Poitiers. The first approach is Motor Current Signature Analysis (MCSA) with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), in which measurements have to be processed in the frequency domain before training the CNN to ensure that the resulting model is physically informed. A double input CNN has been introduced to perform a 100% detection regardless of the speed and load torque value. A second approach is the Principal Components Analysis (PCA), in which the processing is undertaken in the time domain. The PCA is applied on the induction motor currents to eventually calculate the Q statistic that serves as a threshold for detecting anomalies/faults. Even if obtained results show that both approaches work very well, there are major differences that need to be pointed out, and this is the aim of the current paper.