Tesla Files Patent 'Enhanced techniques for analyzing induction motors'

Tesla recently filed a patent 'Enhanced techniques for analyzing induction motors,’ which describes an invention that relates to induction motors and more particularly to enhanced modeling techniques for induction motors.

The design of an induction motor (IM), such as a squirrel-cage IM, generally involves complex modeling prior to fabrication of the IM. For example, modeling may be performed to generate an IM efficiency map over an entire steady-state operation domain. The IM efficiency map may allow for an understanding of loss during the use of the IM.

At present, techniques to perform such modeling require a large amount of computing resources, such as processing components, memory, and processing time, to viably analyze large numbers of IM variations. Current techniques to analyze the physical characteristics of an IM design may leverage time-stepping finite element analysis (FEA). Due to the great computational complexity required by computing resources configured to implement such FEA techniques, resulting analyzes may take days or weeks of processing time. Due to this substantial processing time, an entity may have limited ability to optimize an IM through modeling substantial variations while adhering to a product release schedule. In this way, the entity may be hindered through presently inefficient modeling techniques.

Other techniques to perform modeling fail to provide the accuracy required for production-level IMs. For example, other techniques may model an IM without the use of FEA. Such techniques may reduce processing time but may be infeasible for use in designing optimized IMs due to their limited accuracy.


Source: Tesla patent.
Figure 2A is a flowchart of an example process for determining loss associated with an induction motor (IM) according to the techniques described herein.

Tesla's invention relates to induction motors, and more particularly to enhanced modeling techniques for induction motors. An example method described in the patent includes accessing circuit model information associated with an IM, the circuit model information representing rotor bars of the IM as each including respective rotor segments. Rotor segment nominal currents associated with the rotor segments are determined, with the determination being based on performing finite element analysis (FEA) over a grid and use of a linearized circuit model. Rotor segment ripple currents associated with the rotor segments are determined, with the determination being based on performance of FEA to extract flux ripple samples over the grid, with the flux ripple samples being transformed into a time-varying rotor flux ripple signal, and with the rotor segment ripple currents being determined based on the time-varying rotor flux ripple signal. Losses associated with the IM are determined.

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