Performance enhancement of wound rotor induction motor by rotor capacitive reactance control using computational intelligence techniques

Abstract

Induction Motors (IM) are the most widely used electrical machine. newlineThey consume more than 60% of total electrical energy worldwide. Based on newlinethe rotor design and construction, induction motors are classified as Squirrel- newlineCage Induction Motor (SCIM) and Wound Rotor Induction Motors (WRIM). newlineWRIM has many promising features and advantages like high torque, starting newlinewith high inertia loads, adjustable speed drives and soft starts with reduction newlinein starting currents. This leads to the necessity of improving the performance newlinecharacteristics such as efficiency, power factor, speed-torque in a wide newlineoperating range and reducing harmonics. Hence the performance newlineenhancement is the major objective of this work. The conventional variable Rotor Resistance control reduces the newlinemachine efficiency due to high copper losses in the rotor. In recent years, the newlineresearch focus has been on the rotor impedance control. This research deals newlinewith varying the rotor impedance by controlling external rotor capacitance. newlineThis work introduces several novel rotor impedance control schemes to newlineovercome losses due to rotor resistance control. This work is an attempt to illustrate the utility and effectiveness of newlineComputational Intelligent Techniques in modeling, control and finding the newlineoptimal value of the rotor capacitance for efficient operation of the motor. The newlinepresent work will concentrate on the pioneering of i. Genetic Algorithm (GA) based Rotor Capacitive Reactance newlineControl (RCRC) newlineii. Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC) based RCRC newlineiii. Hardware implementation of RCRC newlineiv. Artificial Neural Network based RCRC. In GA based approach, rotor capacitive reactance is adjusted such newlinethat for any desired torque and slip values, the total copper loss is minimized. newlineIn the proposed method, GA is used as an optimization tool to find the newlineoptimum value of the rotor capacitive reactance. The simulation results newlinevalidate improvement in WRIM efficiency.