Diagnosis of ITSC fault in the electrical vehicle powertrain system through signal processing analysis

The three-phase induction motor is well suited for a wide range of mobile drives, specifically for electric vehicle powertrain. During the entire life cycle of the electric motor, some types of failures can occur, with stator winding failure being the most common. The impact of this failure must be considered from the incipient as it can affect the performance of the motor, especially for electrically powered vehicle application. In this paper, the intern turn short circuit of the stator winding was studied using Fast Fourier transform (FFT) and Shor-Time Fourier transform (STFT) approaches. The residuals current between the estimated currents provided by the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the actual ones are used for fault diagnosis and identification. Through FFT, the residual spectrum is sensitive to faults and gives the extraction of inter-turn short circuit (ITSC) related frequencies in the phase winding. In addition, the FFT is used to obtain information about when and where the ITSC appears in the phase winding. Indeed, the results allow to know the faulty phase, to estimate the fault rate and the fault occurrence frequency as well as their appearance time.