End-quality control in the manufacturing of electrical motors

Abstract

Guaranteeing 100 % fault free products at minimal operational costs has become a widely accepted paradigm in practically all branches of manufacturing. In turn, the entire system of quality control has to be properly designed, with particular emphasis on final quality assessment of the products. In this chapter we present an advanced system for quality assessment of electrical motors which has been developed and successfully implemented in the final stage of the manufacturing process. The system is aimed at detecting and isolating the tiniest defects that can be caused by assembly errors as well as errors in input materials and assembly parts. The core of the system relies on innovative hardware and software modules for feature extraction which perform analysis of commutation, vibration analysis, and sound analysis. The design and performance of the diagnostic algorithms tailored to a variety of mechanical and electrical faults are presented in detail.