Infrared Thermography Smart Sensor for the Condition Monitoring of gearbox and Bearings Faults in Induction Motors

Abstract

[EN] The monitoring of machine conditions is very important from the viewpoints of productivity, economic benefits, and maintenance. Several techniques have been proposed where the sensors are the key to provide relevant information to verify the system. Recently, the smart sensor con-cept is tendency where the sensors are integrated with a data processing unit executing dedicated algorithms for generating in situ meaningful information about the system. Also, the infrared thermography has gained relevance for monitoring processes, since the new infrared cameras have more resolution, smaller dimensions, reliability, functionality, and lower costs. These units were firstly used as secondary elements in the condition monitoring of machines, but thanks to modern techniques for data processing the infrared sensors can be used to give a first, or even a direct, diagnosis in a nonintrusive way for industrial applications. Therefore, in this manuscript the structure and development of an infrared thermography-based smart sensor for diagnosing faults in the elements associated to induction motors, like rolling bearings and the gearbox, is described. The smart sensor structure includes five main parts: infrared primary sensor, pre-processing module, image processing module, classification of faults, and user interface. The in-frared primary sensor considers a low-cost micro thermal camera for acquiring the thermal im-ages. The processing modules and the classification module implement the data processing algo-rithms into digital development boards enabling the characteristic of smart to the system. Final-ly, the interface module allows the final users require to the smart sensor to perform processing actions and data visualization, with the additional feature that the diagnosis report can be get-ting out from the system. The smart sensor is validated in a real experimental test bench demon-strating its capabilities in different case studies.