Efficiency Enhancement of General AC Drive System by Remanufacturing Induction Motor With Interior Permanent-Magnet Rotor

Alternating-current motor drive systems consume the majority of global electricity, but most of them are still not efficient enough. This paper proposes a complete solution to the efficiency enhancement of general induction motor (IM) drive systems with the least cost and a high reliability. On the motor side, the squirrel-cage rotors of IMs are replaced with optimally designed interior permanent-magnet (PM) rotors without damping windings; meanwhile, other assemblies remained unchanged. Stators with both wye- and delta-connected windings are investigated, and super premium efficiency (IE4) is achieved on all the remanufactured motors in this paper. On the drive side, the maximum efficiency per ampere algorithm is realized based on the position-sensorless control to better exert the motor efficiency and reduce the system cost. For applications where an original IM is used under a grid drive, this paper safely switches the remanufactured interior PM synchronous motors from an inverter to the grid drive. A total of seven prototypes with different rated powers and velocities are remanufactured, and various experiments are provided as the verifications of the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed solution.