A novel indicator of stator winding inter-turn fault in induction motor using infrared thermal imaging

•Offering a new method for detecting stator winding short circuit in induction motor.•This fault indicator is based on using Infrared Thermal Image (ITI) from motor body.•Excessive heat caused by high current amplitude in the shorted path makes ITI useful.•Features are based on temperature profile histogram and hot spot region of the ITI.•Comparing extracted features with healthy motor features to determine fault severity.

In this paper, a novel online and non-destructive algorithm is proposed to detect inter-turn short circuit faults in the stator windings of an induction motor. This fault detection algorithm is based on the features extracted from infrared images taken from the hottest region of the motor surface. Feature extraction method from infrared thermal images has been developed based on histogram of temperature profile, correlation between fault severity and the hottest region on the motor body, and comparison with healthy motor features. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using a 2-hp induction motor.