Performance analysis of a ferrite based fractional horsepower permanent magnet assisted SynRM for fan and pump applications

One of the major industrial applications of electric machines is driving fans and pumps. According to the pump and fan affinity laws decreasing the speed of the load can reduce the power consumption on the load significantly. Therefore, variable speed drive offers reduction in energy consumption of the induction motor driving these types of loads. As an alternative, permanent magnet synchronous machines can be used for this application to get the benefit of higher efficiency. In this paper, the performance of a permanent magnet assisted synchronous reluctance machine (PMa-SynRM) is studied for driving fan type load. The effect of using different amount of the permanent magnet in this machine is studied using experimental results. In addition, the performance of the PMa-SynRM is compared with a standard general purpose induction machine for the same loading condition. This paper presents the comparison of the energy consumption and performance of the machines under fan load operating on certain typical duty cycles.