Article: Efficiency and Loss Mapping of AC Motors using GEN 3i Data Recorder

Recently electrical machines have become an important topic in many industries including power generation, heating/cooling, transportation and home appliances. With increases in efficiency standards and the increase in battery powered devices, the motor efficiency has become an important topic. This has only been amplified recently by the increased controllability of motors by inverters. Motors offer a highly controllable, efficient, and power dense solution to many of today’s needs. This shift to electrify all aspects of life has all resulted in the development of many research groups focused on increasing the efficiency of electric motors.

The Test Rig

The test rig used for efficiency and loss mapping is shown in Fig.1. The test rig consists of the following main elements:

Motor under Test (MUT) is an Internal Permanent Magnets (IPM) motor

The motor controller is a dSpace board with a dedicated analog/digital interface

The Driving Motor (DM) is a speed-controlled Permanent Magnet (PM) motor fed by a bi-directional converter whose speed reference is provided by the dSpace board using an analog dSpace DAC (digital-to-analog converter) output. Another solution is to use a CAN or RS422 interface, depending also of the communication capability of the converter that supplies the DM