Power inverters are essential components in modern electrical distribution systems. Switches are key elements of a power inverter, and they are the more affected components when a fault occurs. Breakdown of power-semiconductor devices represents around 38% of a power inverter fault. An open-circuit fault will keep the inverter working, jeopardizing its components and degrading its performance. The diagnosis and classification of power inverter faults have become important research subjects to avoid malfunctioning or damage of other components in an electric system. The Fourier transform and the wavelet-based multiresolution analysis (MRA) are the most applied signal processing techniques for identifying open-circuit faults in these devices. They are usually combined with other methods for increasing its effectiveness, which demands a considerable use of computational resources. This work introduces a novel low-computational-cost technique that directly analyzes the electric phase currents from a power inverter, in the time domain, utilizing three rotatory reference systems and basic arithmetic operations to identify open-circuit faults. The proposed method allows determining the specific power supply phase and the faulty switch, or switches, with high certainty. The obtained results are validated through exhaustive analyses against the Fourier transform and the wavelet-based MRA, demonstrating the proposed method suitability for online-monitoring applications, ensuring high sensitivity and accuracy on detecting and isolating open-circuit faults with low computation cost.

In electric power systems, there are always power quality disturbances (PQDs). Usually, noise contamination interferes with their detection and classification. Common methods perform frequency or time-frequency analyses on the power distribution signal for detecting and classifying a limited number of PQDs with some difficulties at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this regard, recently proposed methodologies for PQD detection estimate several parameters and apply distinct signal processing techniques to improve the detection of PQD. In this work, a novel methodology that merges empirical mode decomposition (EMD), the moments of a random variable, and an artificial neural network (ANN) is proposed for detecting and classifying different PQD. The proposed method estimates skewness, kurtosis, and Shannon entropy from the EMD of one-phase voltage/current signal. Then, an ANN is in charge of classifying the input signal into one of nine different classes for PQD, receiving these parameters as inputs. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified through computer simulations and experimentation with real data. Obtained results demonstrate its high effectiveness reaching an outstanding 100% of accuracy in detecting and classifying all treated PQD through a few number of parameters, outperforming most of previously proposed approaches.

Induction motors (IM) are key components of any industrial process; hence, it is important to carry out continuous monitoring to detect incipient faults in them in order to avoid interruptions on production lines. Broken rotor bars (BRBs), which are among the most regular and most complex to detect faults, have attracted the attention of many researchers, who are searching for reliable methods to recognize this condition with high certainty. Most proposed techniques in the literature are applied during the IM startup transient, making it necessary to develop more efficient fault detection techniques able to carry out fault identification during the IM steady state. In this work, a novel methodology based on motor current signal analysis and contrast estimation is introduced for BRB detection. It is worth noting that contrast has mainly been used in image processing for analyzing texture, and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it has never been used for diagnosing the operative condition of an induction motor. Experimental results from applying the approach put forward validate Unser and Tamura contrast definitions as useful indicators for identifying and classifying an IM operational condition as healthy, one broken bar (1BB), or two broken bars (2BB), with high certainty during its steady state.

Mechanical failures are the most common defects in induction motors (IMs). They derive from the continuous starts and stops with high-load torque. They can cause interruptions in production lines with great economic losses. Therefore, online monitoring systems, allowing a continuous monitoring for fault diagnosis in early stages, have been intended for many researches in last years. Broken rotor bars (BRBs) are common failures, which are among the most difficult to detect since the induction motor works with apparent normality without giving any signal about the defect. Several methodologies have been proposed to detect BRBs in IMs. However, they require high-computational-complexity algorithms for parameterizing the current signal, making it difficult to achieve an online implementation of the corresponding monitoring system. Hence, aiming to overcome the limitations provoked by complex parameterizations of the current signal and to improve the fault classification accuracy, in this work, a novel methodology, based on a hardware processing system implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), for electric current signal analysis in the Walsh–Hadamard domain is proposed to achieve online intelligent BRB diagnosis. The $k$ -nearest neighbors ( $k$ -NN) algorithm is used for classifying different operational conditions from the Walsh–Hadamard transform (WHT) of the electric-current signal. Experimentally obtained results from applying the proposed method on acquired real data demonstrate that the introduced approach reaches a remarkable high efficiency on detecting and classifying BRBs.

Power quality disturbances (PQD) in electric distribution systems can be produced by the utilization of non-linear loads or environmental circumstances, causing electrical equipment malfunction and reduction of its useful life. Detecting and classifying different PQDs implies great efforts in planning and structuring the monitoring system. The main disadvantage of most works in the literature is that they treat a limited number of electrical disturbances through personal computer (PC)-based computation techniques, which makes it difficult to perform an online PQD classification. In this work, the novel contribution is a methodology for PQD recognition and classification through discrete wavelet transform, mathematical morphology, decomposition of singular values, and statistical analysis. Furthermore, the timely and reliable classification of different disturbances is necessary; hence, a field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based integrated circuit is developed to offer a portable hardware processing unit to perform fast, online PQD classification. The obtained numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method guarantees high effectiveness during online PQD detection and classification of real voltage/current signals.

Industrial machines regularly work at their limits causing excessive long-term vibrations that deteriorate their movement, stability, and precision. In this sense, reference profiles are able to reduce the detrimental vibration effects by manipulating the machine motion dynamics using predefined movement trajectories. Most of the approaches for lessening damages due to long-term machine vibrations are based on polynomial functions with high computational complexity and high resources demand. Hence, in this work, an innovative acceleration outline based on a Gaussian function is proposed for machine motion trajectories. The introduced strategy simplifies the position-profile estimation that works as reference for restraining the machine movements through the parameters that define its motion dynamics; thus, a smooth and continuous jerk contour is produced, which reduces vibrations and improves the machine stability. Exhaustive computer-based and real-time experimental comparisons of the introduced scheme produces a significantly lower maximum jerk value than any of the others. The assessment of the presented approach was performed utilizing the software Matlab (R2020a) on a PC with an Intel Core i7-6500U microprocessor at 2.5 GHz, with 16 GB in RAM and a 64-bit operating system.