Induction Motor Fault Diagnosis Using Low-Cost MEMS Acoustic Sensors and Multilayer Neural Networks

Induction motors are the dominant choice in industrial applications due to their robustness, structural simplicity, and high reliability. However, extended operation under extreme conditions, such as high temperatures, overload, and contamination, accelerates the degradation of internal components and increases the likelihood of faults. These faults are challenging to detect, as they typically develop gradually without clear external indicators. To address this issue, the present study proposes a cost-effective fault diagnosis system utilizing low-cost MEMS acoustic sensors in conjunction with a lightweight multilayer neural network (MNN). The same MNN architecture is employed to systematically compare three types of input feature representations: raw time-domain waveforms, FFT-based statistical features, and PCA-compressed FFT features. A total of 5040 samples were used to train, validate, and test the model for classifying three conditions: normal, rotor fault, and bearing fault. The time-domain approach achieved 90.6% accuracy, misclassifying 102 samples. In comparison, FFT-based statistical features yielded 99.8% accuracy with only two misclassifications. The FFT + PCA method produced similar performance while reducing dimensionality, making it more suitable for resource-constrained environments. These results demonstrate that acoustic-based fault diagnosis provides a practical and economical solution for industrial applications.