Accurate demagnetization fault diagnosis is critical to ensuring the safety and reliability of permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs). However, the number, location, and severity of demagnetized permanent magnets are mutually coupled, leading to a combinatorial explosion of fault patterns. Existing methods are largely limited to idealized assumptions involving single-magnet demagnetization or uniform demagnetization of multiple magnets, making it difficult to characterize the random nature of demagnetization in practical operation. Thus, this paper proposes a precise demagnetization fault diagnosis method based on a novel search coil (SC) configuration, in which only two toroidal-yoke-type search coils are installed in the stator slots. The proposed method partitions the rotor permanent magnets into several modules and categorizes the infinite demagnetization fault patterns into 26 representative patterns, effectively addressing the issue of fault mode explosion. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the voltage waveforms of the search coil over a single electrical period exhibit significant and stable differences across the identified patterns. By constructing feature vectors based on these differences, a physically interpretable mapping between the feature vectors and fault patterns is established. Combined with a corresponding pattern recognition algorithm, the proposed method enables fast and accurate differentiation of the 26 patterns without the need for complex machine learning models, thereby achieving precise localization of demagnetized permanent magnets. Simulation and experimental results verify the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method.
Gao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.