Abstract:

This paper describes and demonstrates a mathematical algorithm that can monitor the physical parameters of the motor solely by observing the stator electrical currents. This method uses measurements of transient stator currents to identify the parameters of an electromechanical model of the induction motor. These parameters are obtained from a relatively poor initial guess, which is constrained only to be within an order of magnitude of the physical parameters, by using a two-step strategy based upon nonlinear least-squares regression techniques. This makes the approach in this paper useful for diagnostic monitoring and energy scorekeeping. Experimental results are presented which demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on identifying the parameters of a 1 HP induction motor connected to a squirrel cage fan in an air-handling unit.