The research on sensor fault detection has drawn much interest in recent years. Abrupt, incipient, and intermittent sensor faults can cause the complete blackout of the system if left undetected. In this research, we examined the observer-based residual analysis via index-based approaches for fault detection of multiple sensors in a healthy drive. Seven main indices including the moving mean, average, root mean square, energy, variance, first-order derivative, second-order derivative, and auto-correlation-based index were employed and analyzed for sensor fault diagnosis. In addition, an auxiliary index was computed to differentiate a faulty sensor from a non-faulty one. These index-based methods were utilized for further analysis of sensor fault detection operating under a range of various loads, varying speeds, and fault severity levels. The simulation results on a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) are provided to demonstrate the pros and cons of various index-based methods for various fault detection scenarios.
Keywords: fault detection; fault detection index; multi-sensor faults; permanent magnet synchronous motor; residuals analysis.