Abstract:

Eccentricity fault in double-sided axial flux permanent magnet generator is very difficult to be detected as the fault generated variations in terminal electrical parameters are very weak and chaotic, especially at the initial stages of the fault occurrence. In addition, one of the most important problems in any fault diagnosis approach is the investigation of load and speed variation on the proposed indices. To overcome the aforementioned difficulty and problems, this paper adopts a novelty detection algorithm based on Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) which is a time-frequency signal analysis approach based on empirical mode decomposition and the Hilbert transform. It is well suited for reliable fault diagnosis since it is unaffected by transient conditions which make the diagnosis process incur into false alarms. The HHT-based methods has been demonstrated in recent years for rotor and bearing faults detection of induction machine and also for stator faults identification in PM synchronous machines with radial flux structure. This study explores the possibility of applying the technique to the detection of dynamic eccentricity faults in double-rotor double-sided stator structure axial flux permanent magnet generator under variable load and speed conditions. This approach relies on two steps: estimating the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and computing the instantaneous amplitude (IA) and instantaneous frequency (IF) of IMFs using the Hilbert transform. The more significant IMFs are determined by means of Hilbert spectrum, which is applied for accurate eccentricity fault diagnosis. The eccentricity severity can be evaluated based on the IMFs energy value. The theoretical basis of the proposed method is presented. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a series of simulation and experimental tests under different conditions. The results show that the presented approach in this paper is robust against load and speed variations.

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