Impact of Aspect Ratios of Solid Rotor, Large Air Gap Induction Motors on Run-Up Time and Energy Input

This article introduces a unique three-phase induction machine with a large air gap and a copper-coated iron cylinder. The motor is built in an X-ray tube for medical applications where key performance indicators are the start-up time, generated rotor, and total energy during the run-up. The common equivalent circuit for induction motors is utilized to systematically analyze the effect of the rotor protrusion length variation on these key performance indicators by means of three-dimensional (3D)-FEA. However, due to the large air gap and dominating winding head standard evaluation tools, such as the no-load and locked-rotor tests do not provide accurate circuit parameters. Thus, a combined no-load and locked-rotor test evaluation is introduced. Furthermore, to avoid the time and computational effort of time-stepping 3D-FEA, time harmonic and static 3D-FEA is introduced. To validate these simplified 3D-FEA simulations, results are compared with the selected time-stepping 3D-FEA results. Experimental results verify the 3D-FEA results. After establishing a routine to identify accurate equivalent circuit parameters by means of 3D-FEA, the parameters for three different stator lengths each combined with six different rotor lengths are identified. V/f-controlled run-up simulations are then conducted to generate the results. Results quantify the tradeoff between start-up time, generated rotor, and total energy depending on the rotor protrusion, e.g., the start-up time is indirectly proportional to the rotor protrusion and directly proportional to the rotor frequency (the relative frequency between stator field and rotor speed). The effect of the rotor temperature, which can reach up to $\sim 390^\circ \,$C, on the results is included.