Design and development of load emulator using a vector controlled induction motor

This thesis is an attempt to examine the area of mechanical load emulation used for Induction motor and drive testing. A test bed is built using commercial-off- the-shelf (COTS) mechanical and electrical equipment to investigate the adequacy as well as limitations of this approach. The Motor under test (MUT), Torque transducer and Load motor (LM) are aligned and the shafts coupled using bellow couplings. The LM drive is set for flux-vector control operation by using feedback from the rotary optical encoder mounted on the LM shaft. A Real-Time (RT) controller is programmed to control the LM drive to perform the dynamic load emulation and to give operational commands to the MUT drive. Steps taken to reduce the Electro Magnetic Interference (EMI) by installing motor filters, opto-couplers and isolation amplifiers were very effective in reducing the noise in control and sensor signals. Load emulation testing was carried out on linear first, second and third order models. The experimental results obtained prove the effectiveness of using this method