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



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...

UPS Battery Sizing

Various techniques exist to enable the correct selection of batteries for UPS applications.  The procedure described below is one of the more common. ...

MIT OpenCourseWare

MIT OpenCourseWare, makes the materials used in teaching all MIT subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world.

Robots - Interesting Videos

The robot folding towels post below was interesting enough at the time to post a link.  Recently I’ve come across a couple of other interesting videos...

Fault Calculation - Per Unit System

Per unit fault calculations is a method whereby system impedances and quantities are normalised across different voltage levels to a common base.  By removing...

Electrical Engineering

Electrical engineering is a field that covers a wide variety of sub-fields, including electricity and electronics. It is a field that goes back to the...

Load Flow Study – how they work

A load flow study is the analysis of an electrical network carried out by an electrical engineer. The purpose is to understand how power flows around...

Motor Starting - Introduction

Motor starting and its associated problems are well-known to many people who have worked on large industrial processes. However, these things are, of course...

Inductance

When current flows within a wire, a magnetic field is created. The potion of this magnetic field perpendicular to the wire is called the magnetic flux...

Robotics - Home Innovations

We have a sister note to this (Robots - Interesting Video), in which I have posted some videos of interesting robots developed by commercial corporations...

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