Identifying and capturing energy savings in an integral motor-drive system

Optimising industrial motor driven applications, when coupled with best practice motor management, can deliver more than 57 energy savings. The need for variable speed drives and their advantages are very well known, but unfortunately, the integration of the knowledge of efficient electrical motors and advantages of power electronics engineering is not well practiced by industries. It has also been observed that further saving can be achieved by integration of efficient systems. In this paper, a compact integral motor-drive unit built to operate in arduous industrial environments with optimised power consumption and best practice motor management under different load conditions is proposed. Reduction of the losses in the system provides higher efficiency and further savings to overcome heat without requirement of any additional cooling system. The critical issues such as space limitations within the existing spatial dimensions of motor, management of heat transfer from the motor to the sensitive drive control unit, management of vibration transfer to the sensitive drive control unit, management of electromagnetic interference within the unit and externally, management of other environmental effects on the sensitive drive control unit have been considered and discussed in this paper.