Adding vibration sensors to every motor is expensive and impractical. ESA reads bearing wear, rotor faults, and load imbalance straight from the current signature no contact with the shaft.
Four classes of motor fault, all visible in the current signature.
Outer race, inner race, and ball-spin frequencies appear as sidebands around the line frequency. ESA tracks them and trends amplitude.
Broken rotor bars produce slip-frequency sidebands. ESA flags developing fractures weeks before mechanical failure.
Phase imbalance, winding shorts, and ground faults all leave electrical fingerprints. ESA catches them as they develop.
Load profiles reveal coupling issues, eccentricity, and pump cavitation catching mechanical problems through electrical evidence.
A vibration sensor costs $300, takes 30 minutes to install per motor, and needs replacement batteries. An ESA install is a CT clip on the motor feed in the panel one location, one technician, no shutdown.
Use both for the most critical assets. Use ESA for the long tail of motors no one ever instrumented because vibration was too expensive to scale.
How this looks in your stack.
# NEMA 4-pole, 1800 RPM nominal [motor.b3.cwp-1] line_freq_hz = 60 slip = 0.018 bpfo_hz = 87.4 # outer race bpfi_hz = 126.6 # inner race trend_window_d = 90
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Engineer and operator questions on this capability.
For bearing wear, rotor faults, and electrical faults, ESA matches or exceeds vibration. For misalignment and structural resonances, vibration is still preferred.
A current transformer (CT) on the motor feed and a small acquisition box per panel. No shaft access, no shutdown, no battery replacement.
ESA features stream into the same fault scoring engine as the rest of Signal. A motor flagged by ESA can auto-create a Nexus work order.
Supported. The signal processing accounts for VFD harmonics. Detection sensitivity is slightly reduced for very low-load operation.
Edge condition monitoring works best as a stack.
30-minute walkthrough on a real chilled-water pump from the spectrum to the trended bearing severity to the auto-generated work order.
