Novel Fault Diagnosis of a Conveyor Belt Mis-Tracking via Motor Current Signature Analysis.

For the first time ever worldwide, this paper proposes, investigates, and validates, by multiple experiments, a new online automatic diagnostic technology for the belt mis-tracking of belt conveyor systems based on motor current signature analysis (MCSA). Three diagnostic technologies were investigated, experimentally evaluated, and compared for conveyor belt mis-tracking diagnosis. The proposed technologies are based on three higher-order spectral diagnostic features: bicoherence, tricoherence, and the cross-correlation of spectral moduli of order 3 (CCSM3). The investigation of the proposed technologies via comprehensive experiments has shown that technology based on the CCSM3 is highly effective for diagnosing a conveyor belt mis-tracking via MCSA.

Novel Diagnosis Technologies for a Lack of Oil Lubrication in Gearmotor Systems, Based on Motor Current Signature Analysis.

Due to the wide use of gearmotor systems in industry, many diagnostic techniques have been developed/employed to prevent their failures. An insufficient lubrication of gearboxes of these machines could shorten their life and lead to catastrophic failures and losses, making it important to ensure a required lubrication level. For the first time in worldwide terms, this paper proposed to diagnose a lack of gearbox oil lubrication using motor current signature analysis (MCSA). This study proposed, investigated, and experimentally validated two new technologies to diagnose a lack of lubrication of gear motor systems based on MCSA. Two new diagnostic features were extracted from the current signals of a three-phase induction motor. The effectiveness of the proposed technologies was evaluated for different gear lubrication levels and was compared for three phases of motor current signals and for a case of averaging the proposed diagnostic features over three phases. The results confirmed a high effectiveness of the proposed technologies for diagnosing a lack of oil lubrication in gearmotor systems. Other contributions were as follows: (i) it was shown for the first time in worldwide terms, that the motor current nonlinearity level increases with the reduction of the sgearbox oil level; (ii) novel experimental validations of the proposed two diagnostic technologies via comprehensive experimental trials (iii) novel experimental comparisons of the diagnosis effectiveness of the proposed two diagnostic technologies.