8 Motor parts and common faults 

By on

Straight forward list of some common motor faults:

  1. Shaft - Imbalance, Misalignment, Wear
  2. Rotor - Imbalance, Rotor Bar Faults, Loose Rotor, Eccentricity
  3. Stator - Stator Looseness, Incorrect Air Gap, Winding Fault
  4. Motor Bearing Housing -Mechanical Looseness, Misalignment
  5. Rolling Element Bearings - Cage, Ball/Roller, Outer and Inner Race Defects Looseness within the bearing
  6. Motor Feet - Structural Looseness/Soft Foot
  7. Base-plate/Foundations - Structural Looseness, Twisted Supports
  8. Motor insulation - Insulation breakdown

 If I've missed any other common faults, please take a bit of time to add them in as a comment below.



Steven McFadyen's avatar Steven McFadyen

Steven has over twenty five years experience working on some of the largest construction projects. He has a deep technical understanding of electrical engineering and is keen to share this knowledge. About the author

myElectrical Engineering

comments powered by Disqus

  1. Rajeevankeeran's avatar Rajeevankeeran says:
    12/28/2011 7:38 AM

    While it may not be a major problem in Low Voltage Motors, bearing damage due to circulating currents needs special mention. With Regards and wishing all a Happy New Year.


Comments are closed for this post:
  • have a question or need help, please use our Questions Section
  • spotted an error or have additional info that you think should be in this post, feel free to Contact Us



Why is electricity so hard to understand?

It's been a busy few months on different projects or busy couple of decades depending on how I look at it. I can say that on the odd (frequent) occasion...

How Electrical Circuits Work

If you have no idea how electrical circuits work, or what people mean then they talk about volts and amps, hopefully I can shed a bit light.  I’m intending...

Post Authorship

In 2011, with the introduction of it’s Panda search ranking algorithms, Google introduced tools for determining the original author of posts.  The intention...

Michael Faraday (the father of electrical engineering)

Famed English chemist and physicist Michael Faraday was born on September 22, 1791, in Newington Butts, a suburb of Surrey just south of the London Bridge...

Fault Calculation - Symmetrical Components

For unbalance conditions the calculation of fault currents is more complex. One method of dealing with this is symmetrical components. Using symmetrical...

Aluminium Windings - Dry Type Transformers

The other day I was talking to a colleague who is a building services consultant.  Despite regularly specifying dry-type/cast resin transformers he was...

How to Size Current Transformers

The correct sizing of current transformers is required to ensure satisfactory operation of measuring instruments and protection relays. Several methods...

3 Phase Loads

Three phase systems are derived from three separate windings, either connected in delta or star (wye). Each winding can be treated separately, leading...

Contribute to myElectrcial

Have an opinion or something to say, want to ask or answer questions, share your knowledge then use our site to do it . As a community of people interested...

The ac resistance of conductors

In a previous article I looked at the dc resistance of conductors and in this article we turn our attention to ac resistance. If you have not read the...

Have some knowledge to share

If you have some expert knowledge or experience, why not consider sharing this with our community.  

By writing an electrical note, you will be educating our users and at the same time promoting your expertise within the engineering community.

To get started and understand our policy, you can read our How to Write an Electrical Note