Electric Motors and Drives: Condition Monitoring, High-Power Applications, and Teaching [Editor’s Column]

Like last year, the December issue of
IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine
highlights, through three feature articles, some recent advances of industrial electronics in the field of electric motors and drives. In the first article, by Osornio-Rios et al.
[A1]
, the authors present data fusion system intended for automatic fault diagnosis of electric motors. The proposed data fusion system advantageously combines the analysis of currents, stray magnetic fluxes, and infrared data, using only low-end and noninvasive sensors. In the second article, by Deng et al.
[A2]
, the authors compare various converter topologies and research progress for high-power ac drives. In addition, a novel medium-frequency ac link powered machine drive system is analyzed in more detail, showing that this new solution represents a good compromise among all the technical constraints inherent to such types of applications. The section ends with an article by Pulle et al.
[A3]
. In it, the authors present a complete and low-cost framework based on a digital signal processor controller to learn the control theory and techniques of motor drives, which includes several steps: simulation, cosimulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and hands-on experience.