© 1972-2012 IEEE. A detailed study on the energy content of a principal slot harmonic (PSH) in an induction motor operating at variable slip is carried out. The machine is tested under different faulty conditions, namely, broken rotor bar, mixed eccentricity, and interturn short circuit. The use of a combined time-frequency analysis and particle filtering feature extraction procedure allows tracking the evolution of a PSH under different load profiles and integrating its energy. The proposed fault indicator provides values that are equivalent with the traditional one for stationary operation even in the case of pulsating load. The results show that the energy in the PSH reflects the overall state of the machine under these conditions. Furthermore, procedures to discern the different faults in real applications are proposed.