Fault Diagnosis Method for Marine Electric Propulsion Systems Based on Zero-Crossing Tacholess Order Tracking

Abstract

In marine electric propulsion systems (MEPS) driven by variable-frequency drives, motor current signals often exhibit complex modulation components, ambiguous spectra, and severe noise interference, rendering it challenging to extract fault-related modulation components. To address this issue, we propose a zero-crossing tacholess order tracking method based on motor current signals. This method utilizes zero-crossing estimation of the instantaneous frequency to perform angular resampling of stator current signals and demodulates the envelope spectrum to extract fault characteristic spectra, enabling the diagnosis of mechanical faults in MEPS. Given the synchronization of the synchronous motor speed with the inverter fundamental frequency, this method estimates instantaneous frequencies in the time domain without requiring integration or time–frequency representation, which is simple and computationally efficient. Data validation on a small-scale marine electric propulsion test platform demonstrates that the proposed method exhibits good robustness under variable-speed conditions and effectively detects imbalance faults caused by propeller breakages and gear faults resulting from bevel gear tooth defects. Therefore, the proposed method can be applied to diagnose faults in downstream mechanical equipment driven by motors.

Keywords

• marine electric propulsion system
• sensorless order tracking
• zero-crossing
• instantaneous speed estimation
• envelope spectrum analysis