Search

Electric motors used for irrigation applications contribute to a major part of worldwide energy demand. Efficiency improvement of motors used in these applications is the need of the hour. Usually, line-start (LS) induction motors are used in these applications. However, they are relatively inefficient compared to permanent magnet (PM) motors. On the other hand, PM motors have high initial cost compared to induction motors. In view of this, magnet-less machines like synchronous reluctance motors (SyRM) and PM assisted SyRM are being preferred. SyRM has poor power factor compared to induction motor and hence PM assisted SyRMs are becoming popular. In this article, a 2-pole multi-barrier LS ferrite assisted SyRM is proposed for a bore-well submersible water pump. Two-pole rotor geometry is not extensively studied for LS SyRMs. Further, the issues of ferrite magnet demagnetization for 2-pole LS applications are not explored. A separate cage is avoided by utilizing the rotor flux barriers as a cage, thereby reducing the number of ribs while housing the magnets. This improves the power factor and efficiency of proposed motor. Analytical and finite element analysis (FEA) are used for design of the proposed motor. Further, a prototype is fabricated and experimental results are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a rotor structure, for a line start permanent magnet synchronous motors (LSPMSMs), which can be applied to other types of inverter driven motors, such as brushless dc and permanent magnet synchronous motors. In this development, the magnet configuration is a combination of both circumferentially (spoke) as well as radially magnetised (embedded) magnets which are so arranged that induced poles are generated in alternate positions in the heteropolar structure, thereby reducing the quantity of permanent magnets in the rotor. Both the transient as well as steady‐state performances of the machine have been analysed by using time‐stepping finite element method. For experimental demonstration a prototype which uses spoke magnets (P1), plus two prototypes (P2 and P3) of the proposed magnet arrangement have been built. The former (P1) is used for benchmarking the performance of the proposed configuration. Results have indicated that the rotor configuration reported here (P2) with reduced magnet volume gives better performance than the spoke magnet rotor LSPMSM. Also, the performances of prototype LSPMSMs are compared with that of the standard induction motor of the same frame size and physical dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]