Active shaft grounding system with diagnostic waveform analysis

Abstract

A system that applies a counteracting voltage or current to a rotating shaft to minimize a grounding voltage signal of the shaft, measures and analyzes the counteracting signal, and provides expert system logic that compares prior learned waveforms and models of baseline, fault, and degradation waveforms to operational waveforms to determine and predict faults and degradation events. Self-learning logic analyzes the operational waveforms to look for changes, and finds or predicts fault and degradation events in relation to archived characteristics of earlier waveforms. It then adds characteristics of predictive waveforms to the database of model waveforms, and updates rules and thresholds in the expert logic based on the found predictors. It may further calculate and continuously refine a counteracting signal waveform to minimize the shaft grounding waveform.