Fault and Electro-Thermal Modeling of Electric Drives for Remote Monitoring Application

Abstract

The Remote Monitoring of the electric drives installed at various sites helps in the condition monitoring and early detection of potentially fatal faults, accurate diagnosis of drive condition, and collecting the data. To study the effects of extreme faults on the drive, predicting it beforehand, and providing a solution for the same, the lab setups of the drives are not sufficient. Moreover, it is time consuming to wait for the occurrence of such faults in the drives installed at sites. A solution to this is to create mathematical models of potential faults like under voltage, overcurrent, short circuit, switching frequency variation beyond limits and to create a thermal and power loss model of the inverter so that the effects of the faults on actual drive signals like DC Voltage, torque, current etc. can be recorded. The aim of the project is to model the faults, power losses and thermal effects and integrate it with the medium voltage drive electrical model employing HIL (Hardware in loop) system so as to bring the real- time field conditions in the lab test environment. This model output will be the drive parameters that are necessary for drive condition monitoring and will be directly fed to the remote monitoring portals. The model output will help to analyze the drive condition before fault occurrence and the drive condition after the fault, which will help in predictive fault detection in future.