Thermal Response in a Field Oriented Controlled Three-phase Induction Motor

The research conducted at the department of Electrical Engineering of the University of South Florida campus in Tampa only covers the electrical aspect of electric drives. However, the performance of electric machinery is significantly impacted by temperature variation. The literature review shows three main control techniques in use today in electric drives namely, Scalar control, Direct Torque control and Field Oriented control. This thesis presents a temperature rise of rotor bars, stator winding, stator core and stator frame in a running three phase field-oriented controlled induction machine. A literature search shows that none of research has been carried out to investigate a thermal response of a field-oriented controlled induction motor. With this motivation, we were able to implement a lumped parameters thermal model of a three-phase field-oriented IM in MATLAB Simulink, which allows us to determine that rotor bars have the highest temperatures rising to 84 degrees Celsius. This confirms that rotors bars are the hottest part of a running IM as stipulated in literature