AC Motor - For Maintenance and

Protection Engineers-Part-1
 22 Mayıs 2018 yayınlandı

Qazi Arsalan Hamid

Lead Consultant at Agile
113 yazı Takip Ediliyor

Motors are everywhere

• Fans

• Compressors

• Cranes

• Pumps

• Chillers

• Etc.

Means it is necessary for us to spend affordable and luxurious life with the help of
motors, one aspect is unavoidable that either we are industrialist or farm worker or
resident of housing colony we need motors. But for long-term usage, we also want
to secure or protect our purchased (high cost) motors. If we are industrialist we not
only need to take care of our motor also, but also security of network at which our
motors/industrial system is connected, as Arjit and Jakov Vico informed us in their
paper “motor protection principles” that motor failure rate is around 3% to 4 %, but
this rate will be around 12% in industrial sectors like “mining, pulp, and paper
industries”.

Failures means, Maintenance engineer need to repair or remove or replace affected

motors. This means expenditure, and we called this expenditure a “Failure Rate
Cost”, Maintenance Engineers divided “Failure Rate Cost” in three categories
• Electrical Failures (around 33%)

• Mechanical Failures (around 33%)

• Environmental Failures (around 33%)

If I think like factory manager/business owner then this Failure means outage and
outage means loss of production in industry, which ultimately causes reputation
loss and financial loss. We can reduce the outage impact by proper protection
scheme designing of motors.

If we analyze the reason for failures, it is most of the time due to overheating of
motors.

ACTION LINE IS LIKE,

• Overheating in motor

• Thermal stress develop due to overheating

• Failure occurs at bushing/rotor/stator/bearing/Shaft/frame

If we describe in terms of risks, overheating can possess two main risks

 Insulation damage at the stator

 Meltdown or deforming of rotor conductors
Before moving forward we need to understand the concept of rotor and stator
limited motors. I defined it like “motors running 1800rpm or slower are rotor
limited” We can say that Overheating is caused due to a lengthy stall time of motor
(in case of rotor limited motor). Now, what is that stall time? Motor stalling means
that the electric motor has more load on it than it is designed for and it can no
longer supply enough torque to keep it spinning. In general, this could happen at all
types of motors. The main thing is when the load torque has increased more and
more (which is above the character of the main torque of the motor) so-called
"overload region" where the motor develops its maximum torque. At this point, if
the load torque is further increased the speed will automatically be reduced and this
procedure is called 'stalling'. Now I am saying when allowed stall time pass and
rotor limited motor is still in a state of stalling, then this state will cause
overheating, and due to this overheating, we have thermal stress in our motor and
due to this thermal stress we will have meltdown or deformation in our motor’s
rotor conductors. How will I be alarmed when there is not allowable stalling in the
motor? Stalling may be electrical or mechanical. In electrical stalling, phenomena
can be observed by • Vibration • Humming sound In Mechanical stalling,
phenomena can be observed by • Driven device or rotor unable to move or not
seem to be in motion Let discuss overheating case in terms of insulation
degradation, see below mention figure

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Look in A-Class, when temperature increase by 10°C (means the temperature is

now115°C due to overheating, you can observe the Percentage of life of A-Class
motor is reduced up to 50%. Similar to all other Classes of motors as shown in
figure mention above. Our discussion so far is related to maintenance or operation
engineer, but failure or faults of motors are not limited to overheating only but
there are another type of faults also, like Internal faults Operating or External Faults
Internal Faults includes Ground Faults Intra-winding Faults (i.e. faults between
windings) Inter turns Faults External or operating faults includes Under voltage
Faults Asymmetrical loading Faults Phase Faults on the motor feeder Ground
Faults on the motor feeder Faults due to Overloading during motor starting Faults
due to Overloading during motor running Now as a protection engineer, we need to
secure our motor from these internal and external faults, now we start working on
motor protection.

Overvoltage protection of Motor: Before starting this discussion

“What happens when our motor expose to Over Voltages”, I need to understand
what is the slip? Slip can be defined as the difference between the flux speed (Ns)
and the rotor speed (N). The speed of the rotor of an induction motor is always less
than its synchronous speed. Ok,

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now from this figure, we can see “C” is our magnetization current, and our motor
current is comprised of load current and magnetization current, magnetization
current is always desired to be low, but if it increases in our motor, our load current
definitely decreased which is never desired by an electrical engineer or utility or
industrialist. Please note if magnetization current increases then our core loses
reduces and if our load current decreases then motor’s copper losses reduces. After
this all discussion we understood what happens when our motor exposes to
Overvoltage, in addition, we need to understand one more thing in terms of the
design of motors. Designers always aim to could cause saturation of air gap flux
leading motor heating, and this motor heating increases overall loose, less
efficiency, higher dielectric stress on motor insulation and higher operating
temperature of the machine. Now we understood the harmful effect of
overvoltages, as protection engineers we need to keep in mind the overvoltage
protection as part of motor protection scheme while designing Protection scheme of
motor, it is recommended to set overvoltage element as 110% of nameplate voltage
data, but this is alterable as per the system or utility or client requirement. (Article
from O-Engineer- June 2018)