Glen :
Thanks for your reply. I will get copies of all the spec's and books you
recommend. No - these are brand new atypical designs.
Check that those specs actually apply to you first, MG-1 defines
standard sizes, ratings, insulation classes etc. and IEEE Std 115 is
motor and generator testing standards per my decade old recollection,
but these are US standards which may or may not apply to you.
The McGraw-Hill handbook is probably more useful to motor users than
designers.
I first read Lawrence when an electrical designer taking an AC
machines course at Drexel University gave me a copy about 15 years
ago. His professor, whose day job was designing custom substation
transformers, handed them out as textbooks for the course, claiming
that it was written by the people who first developed rigorous AC
machine theory at MIT, and that nothing written since is nearly as
good. I liked it so much I bought used copies of both the first
(1916) and fourth (1953) editions, which present an intersting view of
AC machine theory development over that period.
Smith goes beyond Lawrence in presenting useful induction motor design
theory, taking the approach of "reflecting" (his terminology) stator
and rotor currents as well as copper and iron losses "into the air
gap", or expressing everything in terms of the air gap magnetic field.
I intended to use his equations as the starting point of a motor model
a few years ago when I thought I would have time to model the 18 phase
Chorus design and have one wound on a standard 36-slot frame, but
other priorities have pushed that project somewhere behind the back
burner.
Books are cheap, why not look into the one Sphero recommended too.
From reading the various replies to my original post, I received the
impression that folks thought it was a troll post (whatever that means) - so
here's the background (in case anybody's interested)
You are obviously new here. A troll post is usually something like
posting 101 things to do with a dead cat to a cat lovers group, but on
this group any question from an unknown poster which does not include
a schematic, part numbers, design calculations and measurements
contradicting those calculations is considered by some to be a troll,
inciting a blast delivered in the same spirit as the cat recipe post
.
We are a manufacturer of motors and drives. I design the drives (IGBT's,
DSP's, software, FPGA's, motor control algorithm - all that stuff) and to
me, the motors have always been an equivalent circuit with saturation,
leakage, resistance etc etc
The electro-magnetics of our motors have typically been designed elsewhere,
and we've just designed the cooling, selected the bearings, stacked
laminates, wound coils, pressed in rotor bars, VPI'ed them...etc etc
This is an increasing problem (why is it too hot? why's the power factor bad
?...) so we have decided to find out if we can learn to design motors
ourselves in a reasonable amount of time.
Maybe I'll conclude that this is a whole career's work - in which case my
next post may well be "who is the best consultant to design the
electro-magnetics of our motors"
Gary
Interesting stuff indeed. An alternate question you might ask is who
is the best consultant to hire to help get you and your company up to
speed on motor magnetics modeling and design. This NG might not be
the best place for that question, but the professors who teach AC
machines at the few universities which still have a decent power
program in their EE department might be a good source of leads. I
don't know if MIT still does power or not, but if so they might have
their AC machines course available on line too.
BTW I have never designed a motor (although I have tested a bunch of
them), just find the subject entertaining. Don't treat my posts as
authoritative but as just a bunch of top of the head ideas for you to
think about.
Regards,
Glen