Estimator of the Rotor Temperature of Induction Machine Based on Terminal Voltages and Currents

Monitoring of the rotor temperature is very important for both control and protection of induction machines. Temperature sensors are usually avoided due to additional wiring. Although the best precision is achieved by test-signal-based methods, they are rarely used due to a high-torque ripple. The ripple is negligible in cases where inherent pulse width modulation (PWM) voltage component is used as the test signal. In this paper, a novel temperature estimation method is devised, robust against the PWM delays, signal acquisition delays, and phase errors in high-frequency voltage and current components. Opposed to previous solutions where temperature is calculated based on the real part of the impedance, the presented method is based on the absolute value of the impedance at the PWM frequencies. The temperature is calculated from the change of the input impedance. Proposed method for temperature estimation was tested on an experimental setup which uses an inverter with sine modulated output voltages and an induction servo motor.