A Low-Cost Energy-Saving Control Technique for Induction Motor Drives

Energy saving is becoming an imperative in the field of electrical drives. One way of improving energy saving is to implement a better control strategy that increases the efficiency of the drive. This paper proposes a detailed analysis of a practical low-cost, scalar control for induction motor drives, which minimizes the losses of the system through the control of the phase shift between the stator voltages and currents. The strong point of the proposed technique is its ability to offer a significant reduction in drive losses over a wide operating range, without requiring additional computational resources for the control unit. In fact, the proposed method can be easily implemented by using an 8-bit microcontroller. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experimental measurements have been performed on the drive at steady state and transient conditions.