Online Sensorless Induction Motor Temperature Monitoring

A sensorless internal temperature monitoring method for induction motors is proposed in this paper. This method can be embedded in standard motor drives, and is based on the stator windings resistance variation with temperature. A small AC signal is injected to the motor, superimposed to the power supply current, in order to measure the stator resistance online. The proposed method has the advantage of requiring a very low-level monitoring signal, hence the motor torque perturbations and additional power losses are negligible. Furthermore, temperature estimations do not depend on the knowledge of any other motor parameter, since the method is not based on a model. This makes the proposed method more robust than model-based methods. Experimental results that validate the proposal are also presented.